


And All the Wandering Motions

by guardingdark, mylordshesacactus



Category: Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005), Sarah Jane Adventures
Genre: Agender Character, Alien Biology, Developing Relationship, Domestic Violence, Dr Nyarlathotep | Time Lords Are Aliens, F/F, F/M, Interracial Relationship, M/M, Other, Psychological Trauma, Sensory Deprivation, Stockholm Syndrome, Trans Male Character, Year That Never Was
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-16
Updated: 2013-11-29
Packaged: 2018-01-01 01:34:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 14
Words: 51,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1038770
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/guardingdark/pseuds/guardingdark, https://archiveofourown.org/users/mylordshesacactus/pseuds/mylordshesacactus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a crackle of static and a burst of sparks—for a moment Martha thought the Master had burned a hole in him—and with a ripple like a force field dropping, the Doctor… changed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry. Blame NaNo and that rule which says something along the lines of "everybody has to write a YTNW AU at some point in their lives". Co-written with [mylordshesacactus](mylordshesacactus.tumblr.com), against the better judgement of us both.
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: character death, body horror, torture, genocide, molestation, xenophobia, casual ableism, exposition, and strained attempts at glossing over canon content as quickly as possible.

In retrospect, the plan had been monumentally stupid. Jack fingered the TARDIS key, avoiding a cameraman and waiting for it all to go to hell—as brilliant as the Doctor was, low-level perception filters weren't exactly foolproof, and despite his assurances that they would be in no danger from the Master (who wouldn't, the Doctor explained, be fooled by the TARDIS keys), Jack had his doubts. The Doctor was oblivious at the best of times, but this might have set a new record. Even on the off-chance the Doctor's insane ex didn't hurt _him_ , there was nothing at all protecting Martha, who had neither personal history or immortality on her side.

It was the kind of oversight Jack wasn't used to seeing the Doctor make, and the thought of what else their resident less-crazy Time Lord might have miscalculated was not an encouraging one. He glanced at Martha. If it came down to it, he decided, he could tackle her from here, cover her with his body. Not exactly the circumstances he would have chosen for that maneuver, but the President was talking and he should probably be paying attention.

"Now we know we are not alone," President Winters was saying, "no longer unique in the universe." Ha, _unique_! That was a trip. Jack could think of thirty alien species off-hand that looked nearly identical to humans. "And I ask of you now," he continued, "I ask of the human race, to join me in welcoming our new friends." Winters paused for dramatic effect, looking for a moment around the room (his eyes jumping completely over where they stood beneath their perception filters), and then flung his arms wide. "I give you the Toclafane!"

Jack tensed. This was it. He'd seen this a thousand times before—never on this scale, never with Time Lords involved, but the scene itself had played over countless times. Humans who thought they were controlling an alien species, right up until it killed them without a moment's pause; advanced species, playing lower beings like fiddles, manipulating and taking advantage of them before throwing them aside with no thought to the promises they had been made. Whether these _Toclafane_ were the pawns or the players… well, they'd know for certain once the President stopped talking. It was the chessmaster he was worried about.

"… _the planet Earth and its associated moon…"_

He glanced over at the Doctor. The alien was tense, and stared at the Toclafane with a mixture of horror and sadness. Jack wondered if he'd ever come across them before; in all of his days as a Time Agent, he'd never so much as heard of them, but the Doctor had a thousand years of experience across all of Time and Space, was a myth in his own right. If anyone knew the Toclafane, it would be him.

"Man is stupid," said one of the Toclafane in a childish voice, and Jack couldn't help but agree.

"Master is our friend," said another, and everything sort of went downhill from there.

The Master was _ridiculously_ energetic, like a more unhinged version of the Doctor, and cheerful, but rather than being disarming, it was chilling. He smiled charmingly as the Toclafane killed Winters as barely an afterthought, laughed while he carelessly ordered the guards into position—and of course the guards were his, or at least were Saxon's, of _course_ they were. The hope of a few dozen rounds of bullets to the Master's skull might not be acceptable to the Doctor, but Jack was perfectly open to it. _How had he even managed that?_ Torchwood was slipping.

The Master grinned as the guards ordered everyone to stay still. "Now, then. Peoples of the Earth, please attend carefully!"

The Doctor pulled the perception filter off of his neck. Martha reached out to stop him, but Jack held her back—there was still hope they'd not be noticed, as fragile as that hope was, and trying to _stop_ the Doctor from doing something stupid wasn't very likely to help. She didn't have any protections, as much as the Doctor pretended she did, or forgot she didn't. Jack wasn't sure which was worse.

They watched, holding as still as possible, while the Doctor was pushed onto his knees. True to form, he never stopped shouting.

"We meet at last, _Doctor_ ," said the Master, with some disdain on the title that Jack didn't quite understand. The next moment he was cheery again: "Oh, I do love saying that!"

"Stop this! Stop this right now!"

The Master laughed. "As if some low-level perception filter would work on me. It's almost like you _wanted_ to be caught. And, oh, look! The girlie and the freak! Which one's which, though? I'm not sure. Humans are so _bland_."

Before the Master finished talking, Jack had shoved Martha behind him and charged the dais. There was always a chance, after all, and if there was one thing Jack Harkness was born for, it was creating distractions. The guards were too slow, he noted in a corner of his mind; they weren't used to split-second reactions, they were too accustomed to Saxon's dramatic speeches. Without an order from their Master they were out of practice.

As it turned out, the guards weren't his problem. Saxon—the Master—glanced at him, flourished a small metal contraption in one hand, and Jack had time to muse briefly to himself about getting frequent-dyer miles in the afterlife before a smoldering burn bored into his nerves and his vision flooded with red.

* * *

 

"Laser screwdriver," the Master said cheerfully. "Who'd have _sonic?_ "

The Doctor raised his hand as much as he could, restrained by the guards. The Master gave him a withering look.

"And the good thing is, he's not dead for long!" Martha would never really get used to that; she was already kneeling next to Jack, instinctively checking his vitals even though she _knew_ he was coming back. It never got easier seeing him die like this. "I get to kill him again!"

 _Not if I can help it,_ she thought firmly. Could the Master see her? So far she hadn't tried to attack him, not like the other two…

"Master," said the Doctor imploringly—what sort of history did these two have? "Just calm down. Look at what you're doing! Just… stop. If you could see yourself—"

"If I could see myself? This coming from the one who's worn a shimmer for the last few millenia? Do you ever take that thing off?"

 _Shimmer?_ She almost turned to the Doctor and demanded an explanation before remembering that she couldn't draw attention to herself. Not even the Master was perfect. There was still a chance.

Anyway, she thought as she finally felt a twitch and the beginnings of a pulse under her hand, she had more important things to worry about. Jack came back to life with a gasp, but it went unnoticed by the others; the humans drawn away by the perception filters, and the Time Lords too busy with a silent conversation; this was the first time she'd ever seen the Doctor _defer_ to anyone, and it was worrying.

"It's that sound in your head, Master. The drums. I can help you. I can make them stop!"

"Oh, how to shut you up?" said the Master, sighing. "Oh! I know! That shimmer of yours, is it the same one you always had? Looks like it, in any case—you're not passing very well for human any more, did you notice? You really ought to get a new one. But you won't, will you? You're so obsessed with the past. Do you think that if you have some anchor to the old days, we'll still be able to go back to that? You're _pathetic_ , Theta. Any chance of getting back that relationship burnt with Gallifrey." He carelessly pointed his screwdriver at the Doctor. "Exactly how many genocides is that now?"

While the Doctor stumbled over a reply (and if you had to _think_ _about_ how many genocides you'd committed, there might be a problem somewhere, Martha thought), the Master's screwdriver flashed again. There was a crackle of static and a burst of sparks—for a moment Martha thought the Master had burned a hole in him, but no, they were just coming from his pocket—and with a ripple like a force field dropping, the Doctor… changed.

He was still recognisably _himself,_ more or less; his facial features remained similar, if somewhat more androgynous. But his skin was pale orange, like his blood was a different colour, and his lips were darker, like turned leaves. He had over-long fingers, dark at the tips and fading into flesh-tone; some sort of exoskeleton, Martha realised, with a gradient in the chemical composition. The same structures made a mockery of hair, running from the approximation of a hairline and disappearing beneath his collar. They were flanked on either side by orange-red frills, which lay nearly flat against his head. He had no visible external ears, and his eyes… Martha couldn't bring herself to meet them. Bright, inhuman, and unreadable blue-green-grey, six of them, arranged like _Lycosidae Arctosa._

"Doctor…" she said weakly. _What are you?_ she wanted to ask. _What did he do, how long have you been like this, what_ are _you, why did you pretend, how much was just pretending...?_

_Were you just pretending you wanted to save us?_

It was as if the Doctor had heard the last; his six eyes latched onto her face, and he mouthed 'no' as she tried not to shudder. "They _trusted_ me," he said to the Master tiredly, like they had had this conversation before; it didn't help his case any, and he knew it, cringing at her gaze. "You didn't have to break it."

"Oh!" the Master exclaimed with over-exaggerated remorse. "Did you never tell her about the shimmer? Oh, that's awkward. So terribly sorry. Whoops!" The caricature of an apology vanished into a brilliant smile as he danced over to the nearest camera. "Do excuse me!" he said cheerfully, sticking his face close to the lens like he was making a home movie. "Little bit of personal business. Back in a bit." He tipped the camera carelessly back, hiding the proceedings from the billions of viewers Martha had almost forgotten about until now.

With a slight rush of resentment, barely managing to make itself known through her horror as she stared at the being that had been the Doctor, she realised that he could have done that _before_ stripping off the disguise.

Jack, still sprawled on his back with his head craned back to watch, gave a breathy laugh. "Hey there, Doc," he said cheerfully. "So that's what you Time Lords really look like?" Martha wondered how he could take the transformation from a normal… well, normal- _looking_ … and really quite attractive man into an insect person so calmly. Then again, it was Jack.

He grinned naughtily, and Martha gave a preemptive sigh. _Here we go._ Yes, this was definitely Jack. "You know," he drawled, "I really like the shade of those lips, Doctor. I bet they'd look great wrapped around my—"

The Master nodded to the guards, who shot him down again before he could finish. Blood splattered on her arms, but she didn't notice it, watching in muted horror as the Master pulled something out of his suit jacket. She recognised the technology from Manhattan; the guns the Dalek Humans had carried. Was it native to Gallifrey, she wondered? The Doctor was certainly familiar enough with it. She was so helplessly out of her depth here.

"Our… mutual friends at Torchwood One had this beautiful thing in their archives," said the Master. "I thought you would appreciate it." He pointed the weapon at the Doctor's chest, raising an eyebrow which presumably didn't actually exist. "Don't worry, it won't do permanent damage. Or, well, _much_ of it."

The Doctor screamed, and kept screaming far past the point a human would have had to breathe. The sound was almost like bad radio reception, static overlaid on pained shrieks. It was loud and shrill, and the Doctor thrashed, held fast by seemingly-unaffected guards.

Eventually the Master took his finger off the trigger, and the Doctor finally stopped screaming. The guards dropped him like dead weight, and he collapsed to the floor, breathing heavily.

The… creature… the Doctor, she forced herself to think, he was still the Doctor, he was just _different_ , almost reminiscent of the sweet-natured Chantho she'd met before everything went to hell except orange… lay shuddering and twitching on the floor for what felt like forever. The Master closed his eyes and smiled, basking in the sound of the Doctor's pained wheezing. Martha stared at the Doctor in shock. Everything in her screamed to run to him, to help him somehow—check him for shock, for injuries or head trauma sustained in the fall, to do _something_ —but a deeper instinct even than a doctor's urge to heal held her rooted in place.

 _Don't trust it,_ it whispered treacherously. _It's strange, it's alien, it's dangerous. It doesn't count. Protect yourself instead._

The silence was eventually broken by the last voice Martha expected to hear.

"You have the most beautiful eyes," said Lucy Saxon softly. The creature that was the Doctor looked up at her slowly, and the inhuman, lidless eyes looked almost hopeful, almost _grateful_ ; the vulnerability in them struck a chord somewhere that shook Martha out of her trance. Stomping down firmly on the animal instinct that told her to recoil from the alien, she slipped carefully away from Jack's side to kneel next to the Doctor. She still couldn't look him in the eyes, but she managed to take his hand in what she hoped was a comforting manner.

His hands felt just like they always did, corpse-cold and fine-boned, and so long as she didn't look at his long, exoskeletal fingers, she could pretend there was a colour-cast, or that she was just imagining the orange tone of his skin.

He was still shaking badly and making quiet, pained gasps, but he held on tightly to her hand. "Martha," he whispered hoarsely, pulling at her arm. "The Archangel Network."

"I know, Doctor," she said reassuringly, placing a hand on his forehead. She wasn't certain how to check for a concussion without being able to look at pupil dilation, or for that matter pupils at all, but he seemed to have forgotten what led them here. "It's how he got everyone to vote for—"

"No," he panted. "Archangel, it's—it's a telepathic network, it works both ways, picks up on what the whole planet is thinking, if they're thinking about fear that's what it spreads, but give them _hope—_ "

Somewhere in the background the Master was grandstanding again. Martha wasn't listening to him. The Doctor's voice hadn't changed, not really, and if she closed her eyes she didn't see the alien, she just saw him.

"You have to give them hope, Martha, the perception filter will hide you—get them to believe that they're _protected_ and they can make it real. He's not immortal. You have to give them hope, tell them—one year from today, tell them I'm going to save them all, make them believe it."

 _Bit of a tall order, there, Doctor,_ she thought. Five minutes ago it would have seemed the most natural thing in the world—of course the Doctor would save them, of _course_ he would, and it would have been the simplest thing in the world to convince others of. But now… how would she even start? They'd seen him for what he was, some big orange bug from outer space, and she couldn't even begin to answer her _own_ questions…

"Big orange bug?" said the Doctor, amusement overshadowed by a coughing fit. He was definitely answering to her thoughts, then. That was… well. She only hoped he wasn't usually paying attention to them. "Martha Jones, I'm not an _insect_. Closer to a reptile than anything else on this planet, really."

He was the Doctor. Whatever _else_ he was, he was still the Doctor, and she _had_ to trust him now. She had no other choice.

She had to try.

"Ah, Martha Jones!" said the Master, noticing her as if for the first time. "Hello again! I do hope you don't think I've _forgotten_ about you! In fact, to make you feel at home, I've brought you something of a gift—I hope you don't mind. We've flown them in all the way from prison!" He gestured ornately like a circus ringmaster as the door opened. Her parents and sister were marched in, flanked by two more of the Master's guards.

"Mum!" Martha called, disentangling herself from the Doctor as gently as she could.

Her mother didn't seem to notice one way or the other, and didn't even look at the Doctor's alien form lying prone at her feet. "I'm sorry," she said.

"It's not your fault," Martha said, smiling as well as she could. Inside, she was crumbling. She couldn't leave her family to the Master; she could barely leave the Doctor and Jack as it was, and they could manage without her. She didn't know if her family could.

"The Toclafane!" said the Doctor suddenly, pulling himself up with shaking arms. "What are they? Who are they?"

"Oh, _Theta…_ " said the Master, and there was that name again. The Doctor flinched at it. "It would _break_ your _hearts_ to know. So I guess I may as well tell you, then!" He dragged the Doctor up by an arm, twisting him around so they stood one in front of the other, the Master's hand strong on the Doctor's jaw and pulling his head back and to the side, exposing his neck. He mouthed at the Doctor's neck, from the base of his throat up to his jaw, and the Doctor's frills fanned out. The Master's lips rasped against his skin, whispering something inaudible at what must have been the alien's ear.

Whatever the Master had whispered had the desired effect; he began struggling in the Master's arms. " _No_! Why would you— What did they do to deserve that?"

The Master smirked, pushing the Doctor away and putting him off-balance, still unsteady from the earlier torture. "They _asked_ me to do it," he said, triumphant.

Jack revived with a gasp, then closed his eyes and lay perfectly still. Martha didn't blame him.

The Master was speaking again. "I only gave them what they wanted, Doctor!" he crowed happily. "I _helped_ them. They were so _lost_ and _alone,_ so I saved them and… how do you put it? _Showed them the stars_. Don't you approve?" He whirled and grabbed his wife around the waist. "How many, do you think?" he asked, and there was madness behind his fond tone as she giggled and demured. "Six billion!" he exclaimed happily before twisting away and turning back to the Doctor as if the conversation had never been interrupted. "And after I saved them, I promised my new children _this."_ He spread his arms with an expression of rapture, a twisted saviour figure. "That we would desecrate and decimate this _pathetic planet!_ " The brief fit of rage switched to an almost curious head-tilt. "Good word, _decimate_. Do you know what it means, Doctor?"

The Doctor's insect-like eyes widened, and Martha managed to read horror there. "No!" he shouted. "You _can't—"_

"Kids!" the Master called. " _Remove one-tenth of the population!"_

Martha stifled a scream as, outside the windows of the Valiant, the Toclafane surged towards the planet's surface. The Master switched on an audio system as the Valiant's radios began crackling desperately, drowning out the frantic transmissions from all over the world. ( _Valiant, this is… getting slaughtered… Valiant, report, help… god's sake, help us… dying...)_ and twirled Lucy once before sliding up to the almost-forgotten camera, tilting it back down. "Hello, Earthlings!" he said with a manic grin. "Any of you still watching this and not running about like ants, you seem to have missed an important memo. Basically, er… end of the world." He smiled and gave an exaggerated shrug, as if to say _silly old me._

"You're sick," Martha's mother spat from where she was being held between two guards.

The Master turned to her, and his grin turned crueller. "I'm your Master!" he said. "And you will obey me." He spun on his heel and narrowed his eyes at Martha with a deadly look in his eyes. " _Won't she_ , Martha Jones?"

Martha opened her mouth, whether to say _just listen to him, Mum_ or shout her defiance she didn't know. Whatever it was, she never got the chance. In a single, powerful lunge, Jack surged up from the floor and tackled her away from the Doctor. She felt something tighten around her wrist and for a moment had the sickening thought _he's a traitor, no, he can't be, it's not fair!_ before Jack had pushed himself off her again, blocking the Master's view. She looked down to see what he'd done and barely had time to recognise the device before its auto-jump feature lit up.

"No, I can't just—!"

A sickening sense of being pulled apart, a terrifying nothingness as her atoms rushed headlong into the Vortex, a feeling of tumbling head over nonexistent heels, and Hampstead rushed up to meet her.

"...Leave them…"

Dizzy and sick, she pulled herself slowly to her feet. London was burning. Toclafane, whatever they were, poured from a tear in the sky and surged in and around her city. A long line of them stretched overhead, and she tensed to run; but they weren't Time Lords, and she reached up a ran shaking fingers over the reassuringly cool metal of her TARDIS key.

 _Thank you,_ she thought. It seemed that even the shattered, cannibalised hulk of that wonderful blue box was still able to protect her. Maybe she hadn't been abandoned so utterly after all. Martha felt a twinge of guilt when she remembered the pain that had radiated from the TARDIS when they'd found it. _I'll come back,_ she promised. Maybe someone would hear. _I'll come back. When I'm finished._

The screams from London could be heard even here. Martha Jones steeled herself, turned her back, and walked away.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: xenophobia, manipulation, threats of rape, _actual_ rape, mind rape, suicide ideation, self-hatred, references to abuse.

When Martha disappeared, the Doctor crumpled again, a soft smile playing at his lips.

"I don't know why you're so happy," said the Master, "She'll be killed by the Toclafane anyway, and if she _isn't_ by some miracle, it doesn't matter. She can't do anything."

The Doctor looked up at him tiredly. "She's not _here_."

"What are you?"

Francine Jones' voice was cold, and the Doctor's insectlike shoulders tensed with something like dread as he turned slowly to face her.

"What are you?" she asked again, teeth clenched. "What did you do to my daughter?"

"Nothing," the Doctor insisted, low and intense. "I would _never—_ "

"Oh, _please_ ," the Master interrupted. "How many have there _been."_

The Doctor ignored him. "Francine," he said urgently. "Martha's my _friend_ , I never lied to her and I would never hurt her, _ever_ , you have to believe that."

"You didn't tell her the truth," Mrs. Jones snapped. "You didn't tell her you were really… _that._ What else have you lied to her about? You and him. Are you together? Some alien plot to take over our _pathetic_ race? What _are_ we to you?"

"...friends. That's all. Friends."

"What, just _friends_? Really, Theta? I thought our relationship meant more to you than that."

The Doctor turned to glare at the Master. "Stop that."

"Remember the first time you killed for me?"

"Stop it. _Stop it_."

"Oh, what am I saying?" The Master laid an apologetic hand on the Doctor's head, fingers stroking idly in and among his strange frills. "Of course you remember. It's hard to forget something like that."

"You're a monster." Francine was no longer demanding an answer; her voice was low, bitter, and disgusted. "How long have you been working with _him?"_

The Master grinned darkly. "Oh, we grew up together."

"Yeah, and then he _left_ ," Jack snapped loyally.

"Not for six centuries," said the Master, "and he didn't leave because of _me_."

"He still left you," said Jack with trademark stubbornness. "He chose humanity over you every time!"

"Oh, does he really? I must have missed that. What was it you said to me when you left, Theta?"

"I—I asked him to come with us, actually," said the Doctor apologetically. The Master's grip on his frills had turned from a mocking caress into a firm, controlling grasp, and he placed his free hand almost comfortingly on the Doctor's shoulder.

"Oh, _right,_ " he said. "You know, that rings a bell. Doesn't sound quite right though, Thete." He yanked the Doctor's head back sharply, squatting next to him and grabbing his chin, forcing him to look at the Joneses. "Go on, _Doctor,"_ he said dangerously. "Tell the nice people what you said to me. How you wanted us to be a _family._ How I was your _best friend_ and you wanted me by your _side._ How much you _loved_ me. Tell me, do you still? I've tortured your TARDIS, taken over your favourite planet… Do you still love me?"

"Of _course_ I love you! I just—"

"Oh, good!" the Master cut in, "Because I have a job for you!"

"—have to stop you," the Doctor finished, unheard by their human audience.

The Master ignored him, looking around at his guards impatiently. "Well?" he said. "Clear out the rabble!"

"I still trust him!" Jack yelled defiantly as the guards bundled him down the hall, trying to elbow his captors away. The Joneses made no such declarations, struggling only briefly as they were shoved through a side door and away.

"Such loyalty," the Master said quietly, petting the Doctor's frills again. "Are you even _capable_ of that, Thete? I'll give humans this, they're all so full of _passion!_ Aren't you, darling!"

Lucy Saxon, almost forgotten on the balcony, nodded with a breathless smile.

"Why don't you come down and demonstrate?" he said, humour in his voice that the Doctor didn't understand.

"Demonstrate what?" said the Doctor. "Why have you had everyone leave? What are you planning?"

"I know how much you love humans, so I thought…" He trailed off, grinning widely, like a child showing off a new toy to their friend. "Well. You've practically gone _native_ , so it can't be a new idea to you, can it?"

"What?"

Lucy giggled. "You weren't exaggerating, Harry," she said in a stage whisper.

The Master's smile thinned. "What did I tell you about calling me, Lucy?"

Lucy fussed anxiously, brushing quick hands over his lapels. "Of course. Master," she said with a sweet, nervous smile. "I... I forgot we didn't have to pretend any more. I'm so used to protecting your secrets," she added quickly.

The Master smiled and gave her an affectionate chuck under the chin. "Precious," he said warmly. "Isn't she, Doctor? Fine example of humanity. I hope you like her. I know she likes you."

Lucy looked down, almost shyly. _You have the most beautiful eyes,_ she'd said.

_Oh_. The Doctor understood then, at least in part, staring at the Master like he'd never seen him before. " _Why_? What do you get out of this? Don't force her to do this, she's not _part_ of this!"

"He's not forcing me, Doctor," Lucy said, paradoxically gentle. "He's never forced me to do _anything._ " She looked back over her shoulder, gazing at the Master with sparkling adoration. "He wouldn't even touch me without my permission."

"Lucy, you can't trust him," the Doctor said in a rush. "He has what he wants now, he doesn't need you anymore except as… as _entertainment_ , he's going to hurt you like he's hurt all those other people!"

" _Doctor,"_ the Master said sternly. "I'm _hurt._ As if my _dear_ Lucy couldn't _trust_ me."

Lucy turned back to the Doctor and smiled as if to say, _see?_ She didn't see the Master's cold smirk when she turned her back.

"Lucy," the Doctor said urgently. "Please, you need to—"

"That's quite enough out of you," the Master interrupted. "It's rude to keep a lady waiting. Come here, darling," he added with a sugary smile—was he _batting his eyelashes_ or did the Doctor just imagine that?—and Lucy blushed prettily and slipped into his lap, kissing him. He hooked an arm securely around her waist, wrinkling his nose playfully, and she giggled again.

She raised a hand to her collar to unbutton her jacket, but the Master swatted it away.

"None of that," he murmured into her neck. His hands ran along her bare legs, pulling up the hem of her dress to the tops of her thighs. "Doctor?" he said, louder. " _Do_ get on with it, I don't want to be here all day. These chairs aren't the most comfortable."

The Doctor looked between Lucy and the Master, but didn't make any move towards them.

"Doctor, I _will_ force your cooperation if need be. That companion of yours, her sister is quite pretty. I'm sure the guards would just love her."

"No!"

The Master spread his hands in a _Well then…?_ gesture before settling them back around Lucy's waist.

The Doctor looked at the Master imploringly. "I don't…"

"What, _never_? In all that time?"

"…Once. It wasn't enjoyable."

"To be quite frank, Doctor, I don't care if you find it enjoyable." The Master raised his eyebrows: it meant 'flower' in Delphon, but 'come on, then' in human body language.

Oh, he was rambling, wasn't he? Rambling to himself in his head. He shouldn't make a habit of it. The Doctor worried his lower lip between his teeth. "Fine," he said, pitched higher than he intended it. "But only if you promise not to hurt Letitia."

"You're not in a place to bargain with me, Doctor."

He wasn't in a place to argue, either. The Doctor shifted slowly to his knees, shuffling over to kneel in front of Lucy.

"It's all right, Doctor," she whispered encouragingly. She reached out and stroked his frills, and he fought the urge to be sick. He wanted to close his eyes, but the adapted shimmer was gone, and he no longer had real eyelids.

Lucy gasped quietly at the first touch of his tongue, and the Master chuckled into her skin. The Doctor moved on autopilot now; she didn't seem to notice that he wasn't paying attention (and how could she, just a naïve human woman with hardly any advanced telepathic ability to speak of?). His mind was racing, barely registering her contented sighs or the smirks and sniggers of the guards as he tried to plan an escape. The Master's weakness had always been his grandstanding, he was smart but he was _arrogant_ , somewhere he would have made a mistake, _somewhere_ there was something he could exploit to figure his way off this ship…

He wasn't nearly distracted enough that he could ignore the slow, insistent press of another Gallifreyan mind against his own, nor strong enough to block it out.

_You could never block me out, Theta,_ the Master said. _You never practiced telepathy on the defensive. Of course, even if you_ had _, you wouldn't be strong enough. Your telepathic centres simply aren't developed enough._

The Doctor had already lost. There was no way to fight the Master out of his head; he'd been right in saying his telepathic centres were underdeveloped, at least compared to the Master's own. But there was still a chance he could lock the Master out of what he hadn't already invaded, fortify the defenses around the core of himself. The Master might have the run of his memories, but he wouldn't be able to touch the Doctor's self-image.

This wasn't new. The Doctor couldn't count how many times they had let their consciousnesses mix together, when they were at the Academy, and even later, when the Doctor had worked with UNIT in the 70s. Or was it the 80s? He wasn't sure. Human count of Time was so inexact as it was. But he'd always had input, always had some semblance of control. After the Time Lords had gone into his mind and stolen his knowledge of how to fly his TARDIS, he had trouble with some parts of mental contact, and the Master had respected that. Even if they both knew the Doctor wouldn't be able to fight him if he had forced it, he had trusted the Master _wouldn't_.

There was nothing good about this contact. It felt like oil in his mind, leaving a residue where the Master touched. There was no mutual blending, no currents of thought exchanging and colouring one another; the Master's mind was covering and smothering his own, and the more he tried to fight it off, the more the waters churned, the more obvious it became that there had never been a contest. It was _wrong,_ thick and black and filled with hatred and sadistic enjoyment at the way the Doctor thrashed and struggled to break through the thick barrier that was slowly submerging his mind, forcing his defenses further and further back, dredging up precious old memories and fouling them with the contact.

Susan or Arkytior ( _When had she changed her name, why couldn't he remember, when had she chosen humanity for him?)_ and her sweet dark eyes, the unbridled love she could radiate when she flung her arms around him, the almost alien joy she took in those signs of open affection, the tentative happiness he had slowly learned to show her in return, her innocence and simple wisdom and the knowledge that Gallifrey had _not_ broken her, that she at least would be free of them, that he had finally done something _right_ —

The Master laughed cruelly in his head, and that small, golden island of every one of his granddaughter's smiles and laughs and joyous hugs was callously dragged through the muck as he forced other, more numerous memories to the surface. _Oh, you_ saved _her, Theta?_ he said mockingly. _Really? She was_ happy _with you, you did something good, you should be_ proud _of it?_

Arkytior's terror and confusion as their ancient, stolen TARDIS phased with difficulty into the Vortex, the long interminable years in which she watched him sadly from across rooms as he brushed her off with polite words and not-so-polite words, as his coldness began to seep into her. Susan then, wistful and alone, sitting by herself in a ship empty except for one young Time Lord too worried about his own problems to bother raising the child he'd stolen. Susan, slowly beginning to crack as she tried time and again to form a connection, _any_ connection, to hold onto, crying silently into the universe for _anyone_ to hold her and talk to her softly and let her be a child. Susan's frantic, tearstained pleading for two members of a lesser species— _You let her fall so far, Theta,_ the Master sneered, _she would rather have had the company of humans than you—_ her voice breaking as she sobbed desperately for him to listen to her, just one time, for him to _hear_ her. Every time he had turned on her furiously for daring to be a _child._

_I_ learnt _,_ the Doctor thought frantically, _I made mistakes but I got better and she was happy…_

_Until you left her in the remains of Earth, living among people who would have killed her if they knew what she was. Until you killed her son. Until you killed_ her.

_No, no, no, she_ was _. She was happy, she was in love, she was safe… Locking her out of the TARDIS was the best thing I could have done. She'd never have been as happy as she could be with an old miser like me._

The Master's consciousness flooded with unexpected rage at his words, and his attack intensified, ripping through images and emotions with a single-minded ferocity, scattering memories to and fro so that it was impossible to separate the good from the bad, pride and joy from guilt and despair. Sarah Jane, glancing back over her shoulder, just once; a moment of horrified realisation before a freighter became a fireball, _Jamie_ (and Zoe, dear, sweet, fiery, _brilliant_ Zoe, but it was the highlander that was seared onto his hearts forever), Katarina's dying scream; Sara, unnaturally aged, Romana, young and golden and not yet broken by the Citadel, the whole universe rolled out before her in an instant and snatched away forever just as quickly. Cass, crying out for help and choosing to die when she saw the form it took, Charley's goodbye and Lucie's death, and _Alex_ and Sam and Anji and Izzy and Fitz. Ace, crumpled and broken and it was his fault entirely, he'd been a father one last time and he'd failed _again;_ Ruath, with sharp, glinting teeth; Innocet's echoing voice: "I hate you". Rose Tyler, weeping on a beach in Norway. The Keltans and Gallifrey and _I should have destroyed you when I had the chance_.

Silent, malicious laughter echoed in his head, sending ripples of pain through the stifling blackness. _You never could,_ the Master sneered. _All those chances and you never could. And you call yourself a_ doctor _? Healing the universe,_ causing no harm _, acting for the greater good? You can't fix anything, you can't even lessen the pain while you wait for them to die. You could have ended this all millennia ago but you were too weak. Well, guess what,_ Theta? _That's your precious Earth down there. It's going to burn, humanity is going to die, and I'm going to make it happen. And you're going to stand by my side and_ watch.

He couldn't concentrate long enough to even think of an answer, let alone put it into words. The Master's mind was too powerful, forcing his barriers closer and closer to the core he was so desperately defending. He was holding it back with less force of will now than sheer screaming _panic_ but a scream can't last forever; he couldn't _breathe_ and the Master had thrown his mind in a confusing whirl of oily darkness, he couldn't grasp at anything outside his mental barrier to _hold onto it,_ he was trying to claw his way back to the surface but there was nothing to claw at and there were _drums in his head,_ deafening and sick as they pressed against his mind and he couldn't breathe and—

_It's your fault_ , said something, and the Doctor didn't know if the source was the Master or himself or the drums—and they were so _loud_ , no wonder the Master had gone mad. He felt like he was going to. Was that his fault? A deal with Death to save Koschei, destroying him instead? He could believe it easily enough, drowning in oil and guilt and the long-buried memories the Master's assault had dredged up. The drums (if they were even real, if he wasn't just hearing his own heartsbeat, unnaturally fast with terror) beat beneath it all, unforgiving and cruel and it _was_ all his fault, wasn't it? Everything.

His mental shields crumbled into despair, Lucy gave a high-pitched keen and arched above him, and the choking blackness flooded the last fragile corner of Theta's mind in a thundering rush of triumph.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings for this chapter: xenophobia, transphobia, racism, abuse, telepathic violence.

"There," Tish said quietly. "You look lovely. Are you certain you don't want to try a different colour? The blue would bring out your eyes."

The Doctor looked at her in horror. "No!" he said quickly. "No thank you, please, Tish. It's… it's not…"

"It's a Gallifreyan thing," she finished with a tight smile. "Of course."

Her hands fussed along the strange creature's shoulders and neckline, smoothing out the wrinkles from the strange, thick robes. She asked the question almost every day, and every day he insisted with an almost childlike desperation on the same cut and colour. It would have been almost funny if the very thought of straying from anything the Master had visibly approved didn't seem to terrify him beyond all imagining. It had been a chore convincing him to let her wash the first set, the ones he'd been dressed in after… after that first day.

Whatever had been done to him, to Martha's friend—and whatever he was, even if she hadn't realised his true nature, Tish believed him when he swore he _had_ been her friend, had never lied to her—it had left him broken inside. Her sympathy was limited; the Master had broken them all, in one way or another. Before the Toclafane had descended, before the world had turned mad, Tish would have sworn she would never stand by and let herself be treated like a piece of meat by some entitled bastard like Harold Saxon; but here she was, doing his menial chores, dressing his… whatever the Doctor was to him… like a good little servant.

Her cynical side gave a dark chuckle at the word _servant,_ insisting there was a better one, and she steadfastly ignored it. She wouldn't give Saxon the satisfaction of even _thinking_ it.

Anyway, she wasn't doing this for Saxon, she was doing it for Martha, maybe even a bit for Jack, whom she'd only met recently but who always took the time to give her a cheerful word when she brought his supper. If the Doctor was a friend of theirs, if he really was going to help Martha save the world, she owed it to her sister to make sure he survived. Taking care of each other was the only way they were going to make it in this place.

And the Doctor… well. Whatever her mother might say, he needed to be taken care of more than any of them.

"Here," she told him. He was ignoring her again, as per usual, but he flinched and his wide, alien eyes looked horribly frightened as she helped him arrange a burnt-orange sash over the usual slightly-brighter-orange robe. "I have something for you."

It wasn't much. The Master— _Saxon,_ she corrected herself furiously, Harold Saxon may have been a myth but she would _not_ call him by that stupid title—hadn't bothered to take away her personal effects. She'd lost her pepper spray, unfortunately, after using it on a guard who'd taken the ridiculous, humiliating uniform as an invitation, but everything else she'd been able to save. Among them had been a high-quality concealer, and with some cleverness and orange dye… "I know he doesn't like to see the bruises."

There were always bruises, most of them on his wrists and back, and among his frills. She tried to avoid putting pressure on the worst of them, but it was inevitable that she'd have to at some point—the robes were heavy and unwieldy, made for a colder environment—and he would wince, if only barely. He was very good at hiding injuries, for whatever reason.

She tried not to think about that very much, and that really only lead to thinking about it more. It was practically impossible to come up with anything like an accurate picture of a culture from two members of it, but she could imagine by their title it wasn't the kindest place. Anyone who decreed themselves _lords_ of anything tended towards cruelty, in her experience.

She'd asked the Doctor about his home, once, towards the beginning. He'd smiled sadly, wistfully, and talked about an old blue box in a junkyard. He'd mentioned a name, but his voice had cracked and his face fallen, and he didn't speak of 'Sue' (Susie? Susana? A name altogether alien? She had no way of knowing) again. She'd changed the subject: What about your planet? and she couldn't read his expressions then, when he'd told her it had burnt, but now when she looked back she saw grief and, unexpectedly, chillingly, _thankfulness_.

She didn't really want to know about his planet, then. Well enough, because he wouldn't tell her much of anything about it if she'd wanted to. They had a thing about colours, apparently, and the intricately-embroidered sleeves of the orange robes seemed to have some meaning to the Doctor beyond well-tailored clothes. They were interlocking circles and circles within circles, without any particular pattern, very pretty and very alien.

Tish reached out hesitantly, pulling the ends of the long, flowing sleeves over the marks left by the Doctor's most recent abuses, dark bruising the colour of dead leaves on his wrists, the cause of which she couldn't name. Her touch lingered for a moment on the silky embroidery; maybe it was wrong, but it was only in these moments once a day that she was able to pause, and breathe, and touch something that wasn't hard and cold and dirty. The golden, looping pattern at the ends of the sleeves was the only one she could now recognise mostly on sight. She didn't know what it meant, but the Doctor had panicked when he first saw it, shaking his head and cringing away from her, pleading in a broken voice to wear something else.

She hadn't had anything else to give him, or the misery in his eyes would have been enough to make her burn the thing and damn the consequences.

" _I don't want to,"_ he'd pleaded, " _I don't want to, please, I already said it was all my fault, I'm sorry!"_

That was what her mother didn't understand. The creature she'd seen that day was not one who had been capable of lying. He'd been raw, shattered, in agony she could feel even without touching him. This was not some alien imposter that had set out to deceive her sister and destroy the Earth. Whatever he had done in the past, whatever the Master had forced him to relive—and if the pain in his many eyes was any indication, those things were not minor—if Tish was sure of one thing, she was sure he deserved as much protection as she could offer.

"Are you sure you're not cold, Doctor?" she asked.

He looked at her again, really looked at her, not the quick glances of acknowledgement that would have irritated her to no end from a less broken creature.

"It's just Theta, please," he said quietly. "And no," he added, an afterthought, "I'm fine."

Tish was relatively certain the Doctor would say he was fine with a foot in the grave, but she didn't question him. She wasn't a doctor like her sister, she hadn't even taken biology beyond her AS-levels; his cold skin might have been perfectly healthy (or as close as could be, here) for his species. She had no way of knowing.

"All right," she said soothingly. She wanted to brush back his frills, which never quite laid flat without assistance, but could never bring herself to touch him easily. Still, she took his mottled-orange hand and pressed the little silver palette of concealer into it.

All… several of his glassy eyes stared at it with an unreadable expression before he swallowed hard and tucked the container into some inside pocket or other inside those incredibly alien robes. Somehow, she knew he was never going to use it.

"Thank you, Tish," he said. He looked like he wanted to continue, but before he could find the words his frills fanned out sharply and he stiffened, turning on his heel to face the guards Tish hadn't even heard approaching.

"Throne room," the first said shortly, gesturing with his rifle. "You're late."

"Best not keep the Master waiting," Tish said, hating the humility in her voice, the subservient little bow at his name that was becoming second nature.

The first muttered a racial epithet, but they otherwise ignored her, which was well enough. When the guards started paying attention, it never ended well for anyone.

"Get a move on," the second guard snapped. "We're not waiting around all day while you play dress-up. I've got better things to do than walk the Master's _pet_."

"I'd be more than happy to tell him so," the Doctor said demurely, "if you think it's a waste of your talents."

Tish felt a rush of dangerous vindication at the brief look of fear on the guard's face. She tried not to wince as he covered it up by grabbing the Doctor roughly, shoving him out the door and prodding him in the back to get moving. The Doctor's expressions weren't really that hard to read, once you got used to them, and she could see the pain on his face as the guard unknowingly (she hoped) gripped him directly over his healing bruises. The Doctor glanced back to acknowledge her with the tiniest possible nod, and then the guards had steered him around the corner and away.

Tish lingered for a few moments, as long as she dared, before taking a deep breath and backing out of the dressing room.

She had a day's worth of chores to do.

* * *

The Master had a beautiful voice, powerful and evocative. He was a fantastic public speaker, could make you feel like you were the most important person in the world, or could make you feel as though you were nothing.

She'd heard this speech dozens of times in the last few months, so rather than paying attention to content she'd had memorised word-for-word, she allowed herself to zone out, just listening to his intonations. It was strange, because when she wasn't listening too hard, it was almost like the words changed, like she was hearing a different language altogether. She imagined this was what it had been like in ancient Rome, listening to the Emperor addressing his subjects, surrounded by marble and brimming with the pride and power of being his Empress.

She knew the Master thought she was silly for thinking things like that. _Too small, Lucy!_ he'd exclaimed when she first told him how it felt, when she was still foolish enough to think he was Harold Saxon. _Have some imagination!_ She'd giggled, thinking it was a game, and playfully imagined Emperor Harry Saxon, ruler of the world.

_Ruler of the_ Cosmos, he'd told her, suddenly serious and intense. _Ruler of everything._ She'd smiled and fluttered her eyelashes like a good wife, and told him honestly _if anyone could do it, you could, Harry._

_I will,_ he'd told her, _and you'll be its queen,_ and she'd almost been afraid before he grinned and took her arm, pulling her down the street and whisking her into a phone box that wasn't really a phone box, showing her _everything._

_Everything_ was what she saw when she watched the Master speak, addressing their subjects with sweeping gestures and wide grins as she sat curled in her seat by his side, his dutiful queen, high above the clouds like a goddess. He had touched her mind once—just once. He'd told her he could, and she'd begged him to show her, wanted to understand, wanted to _see_ and be worthy of the favor he'd shown her.

And it had _hurt_ , hurt more than anything else in her life; it had felt like he was shoving a burning poker through her skull, but the fragmented images had been burned into her mind forever. They terrified her, some of them; pain, and fire, and rivers of blood and planets dying and the universe failing even to blink an eye at the carnage. But she also saw glorious citadels that would put Olympus itself to shame, stars exploding in a blinding flash of raw, unconstrained power. She saw the universe itself ending, and after such a sight, how could there be anything for her but at the side of the one man in all of existence who knew how to harness it?

Lucy Saxon was a queen. The Master was a god. And she worshipped him.

Lost in thought, she hardly noticed when two guards brought in Theta, dressed in those ridiculous robes. He (she'd been uncertain which pronouns to use for him at first, but the Master used 'he' so she'd taken up the practice as well; she'd been raised to be polite, questions of anatomy and the rights of alien concubines aside) was thin and small and really very orange, and the layers of fabric only emphasised that. The Master had told her that robes from his planet were used to show caste; she could only assume these ones were intended to look ugly. A servant class, maybe.

It had been difficult getting used to the new dynamic Theta brought to her relationship with the Master, like an unwanted pet, or a concubine. The Master spent less time with her with Theta around, but he was also happier when he _was_ with her, and she consoled herself with the knowledge that she was a queen where the alien was only a slave. He could never replace her.

Theta sat meekly on the floor beside the Master's chair, robes pooling around him. The only clearly defined part of him was his six blue-green eyes, everything else blurred at the edges for lack of contrast. She could see why he'd worn that… shimmer thing; it had made him seem much more _real_.

The Master finished up his address to the peoples of Earth with a flourish, switching the camera off and taking the steps two at a time to drag her out of her chair and spin her. It had become a routine now, lost the exhilarating rush it had once caused, but it was still nice. It was _theirs,_ and it made her feel important. He'd always said he wanted her to feel important.

He gave her a quick kiss before spilling her back into her seat and running back down the steps with a wide grin to play with Theta, and she sat back, covering her mouth with the back of her hand as she yawned.

While she understood the Master's insistence on using the Valiant as their… home, palace, center of operation, whichever, living on the ship permanently was still taking some getting used to. Most of the time she almost forgot they were flying; the subtle vibration and the taste of recycled air had become second nature. But stormy nights were still difficult. Most of the time the airship could easily avoid foul weather, but on the occasions when riding out a storm was unavoidable the turbulence really was _awful._ She'd almost been thrown out of bed, and had briefly considered asking her husband whether they shouldn't release Theta, who slept handcuffed to the leg of their bed. She'd been worried he would hit his head on the metal frame (the mottled bruising around his frills and on his wrists, from the jerking cuffs, told her she'd been right), but she'd decided it wasn't worth waking the Master for.

In any case, she'd hardly gotten any sleep, and playing the loving, smiling wife was exhausting. She wanted nothing more than to wipe off her make-up, put on some comfortable pajamas, and sleep until morning. She sipped at her tea (Earl Grey, one sugar, and a bit too strong for her liking), stifling another yawn, and hummed along with the music playing softly in the background. Jazz today, with a baritone saxaphone, cheerful and much more her style than the gaudy pop the Master liked to play in his more restless moods. Conducting an imaginary band with her fingers, she hardly noticed Theta's pained shriek.

An hour left until supper, and then she could sleep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: abuse, self-hatred, rape.

Supper was always a bit of a toss-up. Some days the Master would insist on a full formal meal, with Lucy on one end of the table and the Master at the other, and Theta sitting hunched and nervous in a wooden chair next to him or on the floor at his feet. Other nights he would be busy, often working on the Paradox Machine. The stubborn contraption was constantly finding new ways to almost malfunction, and it was a constant battle to keep it working the way the Master wanted it to.

She'd been rather hoping tonight would be one of the casual ones; when her husband was too busy, or simply didn't have the patience for a proper meal, she would send one of the guards or servants down to the kitchens and have a small supper in her room. If the Master was with Theta, she would usually read for a bit and then go to bed; if he was working on the machine, Theta was usually with her. He didn't talk to her much. She responded to his quiet disgust by ignoring him with extreme dignity, shackling him to the foot of the bed as soon as he'd finished his supper, and then going about her evening as usual. She'd been planning to skip her novel this evening, and try to catch up on some sleep now that they had clear skies.

The Master had other plans. He was bored, she realised. Everything was going according to plan, productivity was high across the globe, and even the laughably inefficient resistance movement Theta's doctor friend was rumoured to be leading seemed to have quieted down. The Paradox Machine had never been working better. But it had been this way for almost two weeks, and good news got boring quickly.

He'd decided to break the monotony with dinner. Usually she wouldn't have minded; the four-course meals he would insist on were nicer than the afterthought casual meals. She would take an hour for dinner, then politely plead tiredness and excuse herself. He would wave her off and find something to entertain himself with. It was a routine. She _liked_ routines. They were comfortable.

But she was exhausted and the Master was restless, fidgeting in his seat and kicking at Theta under the table, and when she begged tiredness, the Master pointedly told her to stay. She sighed and returned to mindlessly sawing at the steak she didn't have any appetite for, watching the Lord and Master of the Universe kicking at his pet Time Lord like a bored teenager. She felt rather like she was babysitting a pair of schoolboys. _Harry, stop kicking him or you don't get any dessert. Sit up, Theta, your posture is awful. Have you boys finished your homework yet?_

When they were finally finished, two courses and an apple pie à la mode later, her eyes were fluttering as she tried to stay awake. She hadn't gone this long without sleeping since her GCSEs, and she didn't remember those days fondly. "Bed now?" she said hopefully. God help her if he decided to have a game of chess.

"Huh," he said, like he'd had an epiphany, "that doesn't sound like a bad idea." She smiled tiredly and dared to rest her head on his shoulder as he put an arm around her waist to steer her to bed. There was still restless energy running all along his body, she could tell; but it was nice to see him do something gentlemanly. He snapped his fingers at Theta, a wordless order to follow.

It wasn't the respectful, devoted-wife thing to do, but the moment the door closed behind her and the Master turned away to deal with Theta, Lucy fell into bed and rolled over, letting out a low moan of happiness. She was still wearing her makeup, but she couldn't bring herself to care.

She felt the mattress dip as the Master sat down next to her, chuckling.

"Comfortable, Lucy?"

She hummed in assent, cuddling up to him with her eyes blissfully closed. She could feel his hands moving up her legs; he liked touching her, liked the temperature of human skin. "I'm tired," she mumbled into his shoulder.

"Well, go to sleep," he said, no less gently than ever. "I won't stop you." He didn't roll over to his side of the bed like she'd expected, his hands still running up her thighs, pulling down her knickers.

"Stop it," she said, tilting her hips away from him, but he didn't, curious fingers prying at her. " _Stop_ it," she repeated, letting mild irritation slip through.

"Don't tell me what to do."

There was a harsh clinking of metal. "Master," Theta said from his place on the floor. "Leave her alone."

" _And you be quiet!"_ the Master snapped, and Lucy winced as his fingers dug suddenly into her, wriggling in an attempt to get them off. "I'll do as I like, _Theta."_

"Just _stop!"_ Theta cried, and Lucy could hear him struggling with his bonds. "Stop this, you're hurting her!"

The Master snorted, and Lucy tried not to whimper in pain as he forced his way into her. "I'm not even _touching_ her," he sneered.

"What are you calling _that_ , then?" Theta cried, frantic. "She's in pain! She doesn't _want_ this!"

The Master tutted. "Lucy wants whatever I do," he said, thrusting into her carelessly. It was his Politician Voice, the velvet-smooth enunciation that you desperately wanted to believe, because it seemed so knowledgeable and calm and caring. It was the voice that made you want to do whatever it said, because it could not possibly steer you wrong. "Don't you, darling?"

Years upon years of grooming to become a politician's wife meant the proper answer was on her lips before she even had to consciously think about it. _I trust my husband's judgement, and I will always support his decisions. He has only ever had everyone's best interests at heart._ Months aboard the Valiant gave her the answer he wanted to hear.

"Yes, Master."

It was what she intended to say. It really was. This kind of thing was expected of a wife, whatever their personal arrangements had been up to this point, years upon years upon _years_ told her she had to right to complain but she was scared and it _hurt_ and he'd never, ever hurt her before and she couldn't stop herself from crying " _No!"_

"Master, _stop_ this! You heard her, she doesn't want it, and you're _hurting_ her, she's _crying!_ " He was jerking at his chains as if he could pull them off by sheer force of will, and his orders eventually turned to pleas, _hurt me instead, she doesn't deserve this, no one deserves this,_ but they were ignored.

Eventually the Master pulled out of her, spent, and fell asleep soon afterwards, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. She felt dirty, wanted to be _clean_ , but she was terrified to move, afraid he'd wake up and decide to hurt her again, afraid that it would hurt too much to stand. It burnt horribly, and she choked back sobs.

After a long time, Theta's handcuffs clinked again.

"I'm sorry, Lucy," he said quietly. "It's not your fault, you know."

It was the honesty in his voice that broke her, that made her bite down on her fist to stifle a wail of misery as she curled into a protective ball, her back to the world. Because it was _Theta_ who was comforting her, his voice breaking with genuine pain. It was Theta who'd begged and pleaded for her sake, who'd _cared_ that she was being hurt, and all she could think of when she looked at those gentle, unblinking eyes was how euphoric she'd felt when he was broken and kneeling between her legs.

 _I'm sorry,_ she thought desperately. _I didn't understand. I'm sorry. I'm sorry…_

But she wasn't telepathic, and she knew Theta couldn't hear her. She couldn't say the words; she tried but it was like they were caught in her throat. "It's not your fault either," she said instead.

Theta laughed quietly. "Yes it is," he said emotionlessly, like it was a simple fact, an equation long-since memorised. Two plus two equals worthlessness. "Try to sleep, if you can."

* * *

It was an understatement to say that anyone arriving at the bunker was terrifying. Any moment it could have very well been the Master's soldiers come to kill them, or, Rani's mind supplied, do worse— _separate_ them. After months spent in a tiny underground bunker beneath the wreckage of 13 Bannerman Road, they were really worryingly codependent.

She'd stopped hating the bunker a long time ago, right about when they started seeing Archangel broadcasts of the work camps and it had really started to sink in what Clyde had saved her from. He'd come barrelling around a corner right before the Toclafane had started swarming, screaming "SARAH JANE!" at the top of his lungs— _yelling_ , he always corrected her saying, he didn't _scream._ He'd slammed into her, barely noticed, and had grabbed her arm and dragged her bodily across the street and into Number 13's kitchen, where they'd both been frantically shoved down a hidden trapdoor and into the bunker. Rani's parents had only just managed to keep up long enough to slip inside before the door was sealed.

The Bannerman Bunker, as they'd taken to calling it, was really rather miserable. Better than being killed by Toclafane or shipped off to a work camp as slaves to the Master, so she couldn't _really_ complain; but burying four teenagers, a journalist, a talking supercomputer and a rude metal dog in ten square metres of lead-lined reinforced concrete for the rest of their foreseeable futures was a recipe for disaster and way too many movie marathons. (Mr. Smith was a ridiculously powerful alien supercomputer in charge of keeping their shields and sensor-scrambling fields at full capacity 24/7. They had used him to watch The Lion King three times in the past week. He had excellent surround-sound.)

Sarah Jane Smith was a world-famous journalist; Rani had a lot of her articles pinned to the walls in her old bedroom, aspiring to be like her one day. She was also apparently the good friend of an alien called the Doctor, who she'd travelled with for years to all sorts of places, saving the universe. When she'd gotten back home, it had taken her some time to adjust, but she'd started stockpiling for an apocalypse and did her best to save the world with alien tech and ingenuity. Rani wanted to be like her even more, now.

She'd seen the Doctor, while her parents had been househunting during First Contact; the broadcast had been on in the background. Right before she'd gone outside to see whether it was all a prank and run into Clyde, she'd seen the orange-skinned alien trying to stop the Master.

Apparently when Sarah Jane had travelled with him, he'd worn some kind of disguise to pass as human. Clyde and Luke said that was pretty common, and they apparently did this kind of thing a lot (minus the planetwide invasion) so she took their word for it.

If nothing else, she was safe here. The trapdoor leading down to the bunker wouldn't even reveal itself unless Mr. Smith recognised your biodata code, sensors couldn't find it, and they had some sort of super-advanced electronic barrier that K-9 used about fifteen different words for and everyone else just called a force field. It was close enough. All the Toclafane in the world couldn't break into this place.

Which meant that when someone knocked on the door, they all about had heart attacks.

They'd had visitors exactly once before; one of Sarah Jane's friends, Jo Jones (née Grant), had shown up about a day after the Master's coup with a small army of relatives. That's where they'd gotten Santiago. She'd had to close Luke's mouth for him.

Between Jo, her husband Cliff, her seven children, their twelve children between them, the four children-in-law, Rani and her parents, Sarah Jane, Luke, and Clyde they had ended up with thirty-one people and a robot dog trying to fit themselves into ten square metres of space. To make the situation even _better_ , Jo Grant and her family had all brought massive backpacks and duffel bags stuffed with freshly-stolen military rations. Somewhere, the Master's soldiers were extremely angry.

They had all been incredibly relieved when Jo, after much greeting of old friends and happily catching up with Sarah Jane on what they had been up to since last they met—a conversation that was extremely muffled, as Jo's face was squished into a corner—had announced that her and her clan did not plan on staying. The Grants had stopped by only to give Sarah Jane most of the supplies they'd brought, and learn what the plan was.

It had been something of a turning point, that statement. Because all of a sudden there was going to be a _plan_ —their cheerful assumption that Bannerman Road was going to fight back had galvanised them. Before long, and after spending the better part of an hour gently talking Jo's children out of tying themselves to the Master's missiles and the rest of it explaining that no, they couldn't harpoon the Master either, there _was_ a plan. Mr Smith, with help from K-9 when needed, would coordinate their emergency communications; Jo and her family would spread out across the globe, allowing themselves to be captured in strategic locations so that there would always be a Resistance contact in any given area. Rani's parents were going to go with them.

Sarah Jane and 'the children', they said, though many of the Grants who were going into the field looked no older than twelve and there was one little girl who seemed barely old enough to have been in primary school, would remain at the bunker to coordinate. Meanwhile Jo and her brood would be doing what they were best at: sabotage and civil disobedience. They were going to disrupt production of the missiles, with the help of Haresh and Gita.

"Anything you can do _without getting caught,_ " Sarah Jane had stressed.

After they'd left and everyone could breathe again, it was relatively peaceful. As close as could be, with four under-16s. They had a storeroom full of a lot of really awful prepackaged meals and canned soups, two sets of thin bunks, an air mattress, and a sort of… well, they called it the loo. It probably came out of an aeroplane.

Also, films on the sentient supercomputer. Rani had made the mistake of admitting she'd never seen Star Wars last week, and that had lead to a marathon ("Why are we starting with Episode _IV_?") and lightsabre battles using broom handles.

They were Earth's last defense. Four teenagers pretending to be Sith Lords and Jedi knights.

For the moment, it was pretty quiet. Luke was re-reading a physics textbook, trying not to make it too obvious that he was staring at Santiago's bum and failing miserably. Santiago was playing a card game with Sarah Jane, Clyde was doodling on the back side of the pages of a used notebook (he'd run out of paper for his drawings within about four days), and Rani was staring at the contents of the storeroom intently, as if she might be able to get masala dosa to form out of empty air. She missed her mum's cooking terribly, even if she'd hated how traditional she'd been only a few months ago. Now she had to decide between a "pizza" meal and a "spaghetti" meal, and all she wanted was vepudu and pakora.

At least the "spaghetti" came packaged with a "cocoa beverage packet". Silver linings.

"Hey, Rani, any of the pork stuff in there?" Clyde called.

She rifled through the current backpack. "No, but the chicken comes with a molasses patty, whatever that—"

That was when they heard the knock.

Mr Smith brought up video footage from just outside (Rani wasn't sure how the cameras worked, considering everything ought to have been destroyed, but Clyde had said not to question it, and she was inclined to take his advice), showing a woman in her mid-twenties with dark skin and surprisingly nicely kept-up hair.

"Hello? Sarah Jane?" came a muffled voice. "My name is Martha Jones. I'm a friend of the Doctor's."

K-9 whirred threateningly, wheeling himself out of the corner to aim his laser at the door.

"I was sent here by Haresh Chandra, in Denmark. He said to tell you the name of this… planet, I think? Metebilis III?" Martha glanced nervously behind her. "Also, his love to Rani! Can I come in? I think I'm being followed."

"K-9, is she alone?" asked Luke, tearing his eyes away from Santiago.

"Affirmative."

"Mr Smith?" Sarah Jane asked sharply, waving the teenagers away from the door. Santiago scooted back to sit next to Luke.

"I'm inclined to believe she is trustworthy, Sarah Jane," the computer said calmly. "She is who she says she is," he added, and a file pulled up on the screen. She was a medical student who had gone missing a little over a year ago, her flat ransacked but nothing taken and no leads as to where she might have gone, until she showed up a few months ago on the Most Wanted lists of most government agencies.

"The Doctor sent me!" Martha said. Mr Smith's screen blinked, switching back to footage of Bannerman Road, and they saw Martha's head jerk up as headlights swept across the blackened, bombed-out wreckage at the end of the street. She clutched at something around her neck, crouching down next to the hidden trapdoor. " _Sarah Jane!_ " she hissed.

"It could still be a trap," said Clyde.

Sarah Jane drew herself up. "K-9?"

"K-9 unit assuming defensive position in case of attack, mistress."

"Good dog. Mr Smith, open the trapdoor, please."

The _clang_ of the door falling open made them all cringe; Martha whispered a curse under her breath as she lowered herself down, pulling the trapdoor shut behind her. She edged warily into the room, and Sarah Jane hurried over to the secondary hatch, sealing it shut as well.

All eyes turned to Mr. Smith.

They held their breaths as an army Jeep made its way slowly down the street, lights dancing erratically across the barren landscape. They paused at Number 13 a little longer than the others. Or perhaps that was just Rani's imagination.

"Can they get in?" Martha whispered. Sarah Jane held up a finger to silence her, but Luke shook his head.

"Mr. Smith hides our energy signatures," he whispered back. "And masks the bunker on scans. They don't know we're here." He quieted at a sharp look from his mother.

After a few minutes, the Jeep finally made its way out of sight and everyone could breathe again.

"Well," said Martha Jones, "that was exciting. Hello!"

Clyde waved halfheartedly and returned to drawing Rani's face in the margins of his notebook.

"You saw my parents?" Rani said. "How were they, were they alright? How's the Resistance doing out there?"

"You said the Doctor sent you," said Sarah Jane. "How? He's still on the Valiant, isn't he?"

"Yeah," said Martha, "but right when he was captured he gave me a mission."

"Yes, we've heard," Sarah Jane said. "What kind of mission? Does he actually have a plan?"

"He's the Doctor," Martha said wryly.

Sarah Jane sighed. "That bad, is it?"

Surprisingly, Martha grinned. "Actually, Sarah Jane Smith," she said, "There _is_ a plan. I've been looking for you to help me with it. You've got Mr Smith, you've got the best global communication network left that doesn't use Archangel. I need your help to spread the word."

Santiago sat up, and Luke had to hurry to untangle his fingers from the other boy's hair. "What word?" he said eagerly. "What do you want us to do?"

Martha gave a determined smile.

"We're going to save the world."


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: xenophobia, abuse, starvation, torture, references to/threats of rape.

"Lucy!"

Lucy tried not to flinch at the cheerful greeting as the Master skipped up to her, grabbing her by the wrist and forcefully twirling her around. "Oops!" he exclaimed as Lucy stumbled and almost tripped over her own, unresponsive feet. "Keep up, Lucy," he said sternly. "Can't have you getting tired already."

A week ago she would have giggled and blushed. She was less naïve now. Lucy suppressed a shudder at the dangerous carelessness she was only just beginning to see.

 _How stupid am I?_ she despaired. It had been something of a theme throughout her childhood. Nobody expected Lucy Saxon to be smart. Nobody _wanted_ Lucy Saxon to be smart. She would never need to be. It was so much more important for her to be lovely and curious—curious enough to ask questions, and listen in fascination to the fondly condescending answers she received, and to let them go in one ear and out the other. It was so much more important for her to be cooperative and sweet.

Lucy knew she wasn't very bright. But she was smart enough to realise exactly how massive her stupidity had become.

The Master was, she had realised, alien. She'd known that before, of course, but she hadn't realised what that _meant_. What his opinion of Earth was, of humans, of her. They were _nothing_ to him, just playthings and tools, to be discarded when they'd lost their entertainment value and their usefulness.

She couldn't stop thinking of the fact that Theta had warned her.

She wanted to tell him that she knew he'd been right. She knew it wouldn't change anything, wouldn't help, she knew it couldn't undo what she had been a part of. But the thought was still there, niggling at her. She wanted to tell him she was sorry.

But how was she meant to do that? What was she meant to _say?_ _Sorry for actively helping a madman enslave and slaughter my own people, I know you tried to warn me about that, I just didn't listen because he told me not to. Let's be best friends now!_ Somehow she doubted that was going to be enough.

Because at the end of the day, she knew she didn't really deserve forgiveness. If the Master hadn't turned on her (and then treated it like it was nothing, like her pain and fear meant nothing, because to him they _did_ and how could she ever have been stupid enough to believe otherwise?) she knew she would never have felt the slightest twinge of guilt. She was sorry now because she'd been hurt. It had opened her eyes to the Master's true nature, yes; but if the enslavement and humiliation of billions, the slaughter of a full tenth of the Earth's population with drones made from the desiccated corpses of innocents he'd lured to the end of the universe for that sole purpose, hadn't been enough to show his _true nature_ …

Lucy Saxon was a pretty, shallow little thing. That was all she had ever been. And she hated that woman more than she hated the Master. She hated him enough to kill him. She hated herself enough to stay alive, to keep suffering until someone or something else killed her, until her body wasted away with time. Stupid Lucy, nothing more than a pretty face. Stupid, foolish, insipid, pathetic…

She had a wide vocabulary, had been raised to be a well-enunciated well-behaved little doll. She could maintain an intelligent discussion well enough, and she was very good at remembering.

She remembered every detail of then-Harry Saxon's rise to power; even now, she could remember which members of which parties had supported or opposed them, remembered every little dirty secret Harry had dug up and whispered in her ear while she giggled. She remembered which levers he'd pulled to fling the time machine to the ends of the universe. She remembered him explaining regeneration, in flowery, poetic terms, and how he'd raised an eyebrow when she had breathlessly expressed her disbelief that _anything_ could harm a Time Lord.

She remembered the casual lilt in his voice as he'd listed all the things that could. She looked around; there were guards everywhere, but they tended to stay out of the way, to fade into the shadows until they were needed. Spotting one, she waved him over. A young, cleanshaven man came to her side.

"Yes, ma'am?" he said.

"Can you get me an aspirin, please? I'm not feeling too well."

* * *

Tish kept her head down, standing perfectly still until the guards had dropped Theta off and left again—they'd all stopped calling him the Doctor now, he looked so miserable when they did it. Once they were alone, he looked up and gave a tiny smile.

"Good morning."

He'd been talking to her a little more, recently, and looking at her more often when he did so. He'd asked her about her life before the Valiant, once, but when the guards returned and Theta wasn't quite ready yet they'd hit her in the face and he hadn't asked her any questions since.

They would still talk a bit, though. Tish would let him know if any of the humans on board were sick or hurt, and sometimes he would tell her ways to help them that she hadn't thought of. He would keep her updated, as much as he could manage without putting her in danger, on reports of her sister. She was fiercely proud of Martha, who was quickly becoming the kind of legend that would live for thousands of years. It was good to know she was safe.

"Did you sleep all right?" she asked carefully. It almost felt like a code. He would always answer with a polite _yes_ , but the way he responded to the question would speak volumes.

It took a moment for him to reply, as if he was distracted, and when he did it was with very little emotion—that would be a "no", then, which was pretty normal, especially in the last few weeks. The Master had been having formal suppers most evenings, which meant, for Theta, sitting on the floor beside the Master for a few hours and hoping he remembered to feed him. He usually didn't.

"Here," Tish said quietly. She pulled a slightly crushed scone and a bruised pear out of her pocket. She had gotten into the habit of saving what she could spare. At the very least she could keep Theta from starving.

He took the scone quickly, with just enough control to be polite about it. He looked at the pear warily, but ate that almost as eagerly, making an odd face which might have been funny, given different circumstances—like a cat been given sour milk.

"Thank you, Tish," he murmured, staring down at the floor again. "I'm… going to, ah…" He gestured vaguely towards the bathroom before nodding to her awkwardly and slipping through the door.

She took the opportunity to set out his clothes. She was certain he'd rather do it himself; he normally did, putting his nervous energy into flitting around the room to gather the ridiculous number of components that went into Gallifreyan robes (according to Theta, these robes were simple and informal, and if so she didn't want to know what formal robes looked like). But it wouldn't be the first time the guards or even the Master looked in on them to make certain they weren't building a bomb or something, and if they found her sitting idle it wouldn't end well.

Lying on one the shelves was a small white pill, and she sighed thankfully when she saw it. Painkillers were part of the morning routine now? That had certainly taken long enough. Every day he looked worse and worse.

It didn't take him long to finish in the loo, coming out a bit damp and wearing a clean chemise. After the first day and the not inconsiderable trauma of being forcibly stripped by callous, jeering guards (who had only kept it to jeering under orders; she'd heard them talking amongst themselves about more… physical cruelties), she'd figured it was easier to let him deal with those himself.

She'd had a pet lizard as a kid and could recognise basking when she saw it; even a bit of time under warm water had left him with more energy, and now he looked less likely to fall asleep on her. It had only happened once before, but she didn't particularly want to repeat the experience. When he slept, his perpetually-open eyes were vacant, seemingly dead, and if he collasped into her arms, well. He wasn't heavy, but he would spend the entire rest of their time together apologising for the utterly heinous crime of being _tired_ , and it was borderline painful to watch.

"Do you want the aspirin now or later?" she asked carefully.

She wasn't expecting his head to snap up like she'd fired a gun behind it, or the horrified look he gave her.

"The _what?"_ he said in a panic.

She held up the little pill carefully. "Someone left you some painkillers," she said. She tried to keep her voice as calm as possible; Theta looked genuinely terrified. "Isn't that a good thing?"

Theta's voice was shaking when he replied, cracking halfway through the words and going up half an octave. " _Hide that_."

Tish shoved the pill in her pocket without question. "Why?" she asked, much quieter. "What's wrong?"

"That shouldn't be here," Theta said, a bit calmer now that the capsule was out of sight. "The Master would never have let it on board, it's _poison_."

A short pause. "I'm fairly certain painkillers aren't poison, Theta."

"Not for humans, maybe. But for me? For _him_?"

Tish's mind was suddenly racing at a hundred miles an hour. "It's poison to Time Lords?" she whispered. "How potent?"

"Deadly," said Theta. "The compounds in that," he nodded to her pocket, "and the compounds in our blood… disagree with each other. Violently."

For several long moments they stared at each other, overwhelmed by the realisation they didn't dare voice.

"Let's get you dressed," Tish said carefully. They didn't speak again, but she could feel the adrenaline coursing off him in waves; or at least, whatever Time Lords had. Did Time Lords have adrenaline?

Theta left quietly with the guards, who didn't seem to notice anything out of the ordinary. Tish was certain they would be able to tell what she was planning; she half-expected one of them to demand she turn out her pockets. But, just as usual, they paid her no mind whatsoever, and she walked calmly down the halls without looking at anyone.

She needed to get to the kitchens.

* * *

"Clyde," Rani said irritably, "Move your feet."

Clyde grudgingly rearranged himself so that his feet were marginally further from her face.

"A bit further, if you don't mind."

"I think I do mind, actually," said Clyde. He wiggled his toes, and she made a face.

"You're ridiculous," she said. "Sarah Jane, Clyde's ridiculous."

"That's nice," Sarah Jane said distractedly, sipping at her powdered cocoa beverage. She was rereading _Philosopher's Stone_ for the six billionth time. They'd all had it practically memorised ages ago; they only had four books down here aside from the physics textbook Luke had been holding when the Toclafane swarmed. One of them was Harry Potter, one was a thick, battered paperback entitled _The Lesser-Known Works of William Shakespeare_ , and one was a collection of "Astrophel, and other poems" that nobody could read anymore because Clyde had drawn all over it. They also, for some reason, had the _Or-Q_ section of an encyclopedia set. Only Luke had memorised the encyclopedia yet, but it was getting close.

"Quiet," said Luke, frowning at his chessboard. It was a really clever thing. He'd fashioned little chess pieces out of food packagings, cutting them into approximately the right shapes. Clyde had drawn painstaking details onto the little figures as best he could, though the effect was somewhat ruined when his beautiful white queen had the words 'MOIST TOWELETTE' printed over her face. The board had been scratched directly onto the floor.

They had a lot of time on their hands, okay?

Luke was currently in the middle of a heated chess tournament with K-9. They had been in 'the middle' of a heated chess tournament long enough to have a current score of 341/342, and Luke was irritated that the dog had finally caught up. Rani suspected that his complete and utter focus might have something to do with sharing ten square metres of No Privacy with both Santiago and his mother. It was starting to get to the poor boy. Only Luke, she thought with exasperation, could use chess as a substitute for the shag he so desperately needed.

"Calculations indicate checkmate within six moves," K-9 announced smugly.

Rani stretched. "Santiago!" she called, throwing a shoe at the door to the loo. "Aren't you done yet? I'm sure you're gorgeous, leave some hot water for the rest of us!"

"Correction," said K-9 even more smugly. "Checkmate now estimated within five moves."

 _Just wait 'til he comes out in a towel,_ Rani thought drily. Luke's record would probably be much better if Santiago took showers less regularly and wore pants more regularly.

Luke stubbornly captured K-9's rook with a knight they'd affectionately named The Great And Noble Sir Cheese Paste because of the helpful label across his chest. K-9, for his part, was unworried; Santiago was getting out of the shower now, holding a towel loosely around his waist, and true to form, Luke reacted badly.

Rani was almost positive by this point Santiago was doing it on purpose.

"Game over yet?" he asked. Luke, who was blushing far too hard to be healthy (one of these days his heart was going to give out), gave a sort of stammering squeak in the negative as Santiago grabbed his clothes off his bunk, towel falling an inch or two further than Rani was comfortable with.

"Sarah Jane?" Mr Smith said, "incoming broadcast from the Valiant." His tone was calm as ever, and it came off as more than a bit disturbing. Santiago swore under his breath and finally pulled a shirt on.

The Master's personal crest flickered onscreen, accompanied by the painfully cheery Valiant jingle, and Rani sighed as they both faded to reveal his face, smiling professionally as if this were a perfectly ordinary news broadcast. _Good morning, peoples of Earth,_ she rattled off in her head, _and welcome to Day Whatever of our glorious march toward conquest!_ Really, you'd think he'd get bored of the same opening piece in every single announcement.

"Good afternoon, Sarah Jane," he said warmly. "Children."

Rani suddenly regretted eating her packet of 'Rice Meal With Dehydrated Bean Paste' even more than she had upon reading the words 'Dehydrated Bean Paste'.

"Aren't you going to reply?" he said after a few moments of silence, eyebrow raised. "I wouldn't have gone to the trouble of contacting you privately if I didn't want to have a conversation."

Four heads and a pair of metal ears swivelled to Sarah Jane.

"What do you want?" she asked coolly, setting aside her Powdered Cocoa Beverage. "What have you done with the Doctor?"

The camera zoomed out nearly as soon as she'd said the words to show the whole of the dais. The Master was in his well-pressed black business suit, and the Doctor—he _was_ still the Doctor, shimmer or not—sat at his feet, looking up at him fearfully. Rani really wished her first impression had been something other than _they look like Leia and Jabba the Hutt but without the metal bikini._ There were some thoughts too disturbing to exist.

Anyway, it wasn't really accurate. Leia hadn't been nearly this broken.

"Say hello, Theta," he grinned, taking the Doctor's limp wrist and waving it like he was an infant. The Doctor mumbled something under his breath. "What was that? Speak up, Theta, don't be rude!" The demand was punctuated with a sharp kick in the shin.

"Hello, Sarah," the Doctor said obediently, looking away from the Master to meet her eyes. His own, as alien as they were, were extremely expressive, and in them was an overwhelming sadness. He looked as though he wanted to say more, but he glanced back at the Master and evidently thought better of it.

"Your security is impressive, Sarah Jane. I've been working on getting past it in my free time for a few months now. _Very_ impressive."

"Mistress!" K-9 squeaked, ears swivelling anxiously. "Sensors indicate all protective barriers are offline!"

"Notably _less_ impressive," the Master continued, "is your little Resistance movement. Cute. Also, easily squashed." He waved to someone off-camera, and a few moments later a woman in a black-and-white maid's outfit rolled a tea trolley beside his chair.

"Do the names Alan and Maria Jackson mean anything to you?" he asked lightly as the maid prepared his tea. "They were killed in Maryland when they attempted to destroy one of the factories."

Clyde struggled to his feet. " _You—"_

"Ah, ah. Manners," the Master tutted. "I'm sure… Carla, was it?… wouldn't approve of such rude behaviour." Clyde blanched, and before anyone could respond the Master continued. "Dorothy McShane had rather a flair for dramatic explosions, and, if I recall correctly, an equally dramatic death. She brought nearly half a unit of soldiers down with her. Now, let's see, a bit closer to home now, maybe? Cliff Jones, Natalie Jones, Eric Jones, Silas Jones-Green, Athena Jones-Broadchester…"

Beside her, Santiago swayed. He was even more stark white than usual. "Athena's _seven,"_ he rasped, but nobody else heard him. The litany of Santiago's relatives continued for several more names before the Master finished, reaching over and taking his tea from the maid.

"You must have _realised,_ surely, that you were being watched?" he said, stirring it absently, taking a sip. "Surely you didn't think you'd _actually fooled me?_ Some uncreative encryption codes, a crude biolock-barrier field..." All of a sudden he went very still. A flash of dark rage went across his face, but it was gone so fast Rani wasn't certain she hadn't imagined it. The Master gave a smile that was entirely devoid of warmth. "...Some _inexpertly crushed ibuprofen?"_

 _What?_ Luke mouthed.

The Master stood up slowly, setting his tea aside with a deliberate calmness that was the most terrifying thing Rani had ever experienced. "Speaking of _pathetic, fruitless rebellions,"_ he spat, "Exactly _HOW STUPID DO YOU THINK I AM?"_ The tea trolley went flying as the Master spun around, kicking the Doctor with enough force to knock him halfway down the steps.

"I don't know what you're talking about," the Doctor said frantically, untangling himself from his robes as he tried to stand. "Whatever it is, I had nothing to do with it."

" _Don't lie to me!"_ the Master yelled. "You're even _stupider_ than I thought, Theta, can't even tell the difference between aspirin and _ibuprofen_. Now _where did you get it?"_

The Doctor was struggling for words when the Master, impatient, decided to take a more direct approach, grabbing him and pressing the palm of his hand forcefully on the Doctor's forehead, rifling through his mind with a brutal efficiency which left the Doctor gasping on the floor.

"I know you're hiding something!" the Master raged, kicking him again. "There's no other way anyone could have known, there's no one else on this ship—" He froze again, and that calmly furious smile was back on his face. The Master seemed to have completely forgotten about them, but Rani still whimpered and pressed herself back against the wall.

"...Lucy, darling," the Master called lightly. "Come here."

Mrs Saxon stepped into frame, paler than death as she walked to the Master's side. She looked like she was shaking, but the Master didn't do anything but put an arm tight around her waist, holding her against his side as he kissed her temple.

"Someone didn't think this plan through very well, did they, Lucy?" he said conversationally. She shook her head, barely a twitch from side to side. "Still," he continued with that terrifying calmness, "the idea behind it, that someone could kill _me?_ That's very serious. Naughty Theta, being so ungrateful for how I've protected you."

The Doctor—or Theta, whichever name he was going by—was sitting up now, on the floor in the middle of the large, open room, and he watched the Master's face in terror, turning his head to follow every tiny motion the other Time Lord made.

"Guards?" the Master continued. "I think Theta here could use a lesson in gratitude."

A trio of the Master's inner guard stepped forward; the first one hesitated briefly, glancing up at the Master like he was afraid his boss would change his mind and kill him. The hesitation lasted for about a second. When he wasn't immediately disintegrated, the guard brought the butt of his rifle down on Theta's head with a sickening _crack._ Even Lucy Saxon visibly flinched, squirming in the Master's grip before a warning squeeze made her stop.

The guards were wasting no time now that the dam had broken, kicking and mocking Theta's cries as they tore at his orange robes, forcing him to the ground. One of the guards stepped down heavily on his hand, grinding exoskeletal fingers into the floor.

"Master!" he cried, and Rani heard Sarah Jane muffle a cry of her own at the helplessness in his voice.

The Master looked down at him impassively. "It's about time _some_ of us learned their place," he said. "I am—"

The screen went dark.

"Mr Smith?" said Luke. "Bring all of the defenses back on-line."

"Of course, Luke," the computer said, the crystalline image on the screen oscillating in coordination with his words.

Sarah Jane stared at the screen where the transmission had been for a while longer, no expression on her face. Everyone was a bit wary of trying to comfort her, and instead threw themselves into making their defenses as strong as possible, changing codes, broadening the range of the scramblers and tightening the force field. When she finally broke out of her catatonia, it was to gasp a sound like a dying thing and weep, folding into herself.

"...Mum?" Luke said nervously. Clyde reached out and touched his arm, shaking his head once.

"Mistress?" said K-9, sounding as sad as a tin dog could possibly be. Sarah Jane didn't respond.

There was a heavy silence. Luke was the first to move, standing up and moving briskly across the bunker, hauling the mattress and bedding off his bunk and dragging them across the room, dropping them next to his mother's air mattress. Santiago was the first to catch on, standing on Clyde's bunk to reach his own things more easily. Rani and Clyde quickly followed suit.

Eventually they'd arranged all of their blankets and mattresses into one giant nest-like pile around Sarah Jane, K-9 standing guard beside them. Luke climbed into the middle to curl up next to her, with Santiago—for once not teasing him—tucking a comforter over them both and resting his head chastely on Luke's shoulder. Clyde scooted over until he was laying back-to-back with Sarah Jane, patting the place next to him as Rani stood by awkwardly wondering what to do. He made a good pillow, and together the five of them managed to keep most of the nightmares at bay.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: abuse, torture, rape, character death, xenophobia, transphobia, misgendering, slurs, references to paedophilia. I'm really really sorry.

Lucy was terrified he'd notice her pressing the button to cut off the connection, scared enough she almost couldn't do it. But there were children there, they shouldn't have to see this; no one should have to see this.

She couldn't see Theta's face, obscured by a guard holding his thin wrists in one hand, pinning them above his head. She couldn't see what he was doing with his other hand but Theta thrashed beneath him, kicking out at the other two guards. One of them grabbed his ankles to hold him something like still—he still arched and twisted and fought every inch of the way—so the other could rip at his heavy robes. He made a show of tearing them, reducing them to scraps just to see the fear in Theta's eyes.

Theta was in only the chemise now, the one he slept in. It was a thin, plain cotton shift that fell a little past the alien's knees; the guard holding his ankles jerked him upwards and the fabric pooled around his hips. Lucy tried to turn away, but the Master grabbed her chin, forcing her to look.

"Watch," he hissed into her ear.

"Stop," she whimpered, trying to look anywhere but at Theta. The Master's arm around her waist tightened painfully, fingernails digging into her face, a final warning. "Please make them stop, it was my idea."

"I know," he said softly, running his fingers almost gently along her jaw.

She shuddered, pressing against him because she couldn't move away. The Master continued his absentminded petting, slow, deliberate strokes just under her chin. The skin was soft there, soft and thin and incredibly vulnerable and she knew he could feel her heart pounding, waiting for his hands to turn deadly.

She nearly forgot about Theta in her terror, only brought back to the present by the strangled, broken sounds he made as the guards forced their way into him. The only saving grace was that she couldn't see his face. But that didn't stop her from hearing.

"Please," she begged when she couldn't stand the sound of his pain any more. "Please, this is all my fault, he doesn't deserve this. _Please,_ M-Master," and that was a bad sign, she'd never stumbled over his name before; it had always seemed natural, and she hadn't expected it to taste so bitter now. "He's already sorry, you made your point, wouldn't showing mercy now be—"

" _Mercy?"_ the Master said with a dangerous sort of disbelief. "Everything he's done to me and now _this,_ and _you_ of all people have the gall to ask me to show more _mercy?_ Do you have a little soft spot for him, Lucy?" he asked with a mocking simper, backing her up against the railing while she stammered over an apology. "Is that it? Gotten fond of our little pet, darling? Feeling sorrier for him being punished than me for being _betrayed?_ "

"I only meant…" she said weakly.

"You wanted to _protect_ him because he _stood up for you,_ " the Master spat in disgust. "Fine, then." He grabbed her arm and shoved her toward the stairs. "Go protect him, if you want to so badly."

She was never quite certain afterwards if he _meant_ to push her down the staircase or if it was just the result of overbalancing in ridiculously high heels. All she knew was that her ankle twisted painfully and she barely managed to throw an arm over her head before she hit the stairs the first time. She fell almost head over heels, landing far too hard and with her wrist pinned underneath her at far too sharp an angle and she felt something snap at around the same time her temple smashed into a sharp-edged step corner. Her vision threatened to white out for several terrifying moments, and the dual rush of pain almost made her throw up. She was fairly certain she was bleeding.

Her head was pounding with the too-fast rhythm of her heart, and it felt like someone had poured ice water on her brain and she _couldn't think_ , tucking her injured arm in towards her body protectively and bringing the other up to the side of her head.

There was blood on her fingers and matting in her hair; not much of it, but it was _blood_ from her _skull_ and the adrenaline was flooding her system now and she felt numb.

There was a shout; a guard lost his balance and caught himself heavily on her shoulder. She realised belatedly that he'd turned his attention from pinning Theta's ankles to wrestling her jacket off, and a flood of terror washed painfully through her throbbing skull. Theta wasn't past fighting yet, she thought with a tiny thrill of victory; the guard was cursing and clutching his head where the struggling Time Lord had planted a kick that meant Lucy wasn't the only one bleeding.

She tried to stand, to get away, but when she tried to put weight on her leg all she could feel was a white-hot shock of pain and she collapsed again. The guard had recovered, wiping the blood on his trousers with a scowl on his face, looking back at Theta. The alien didn't hold his attention for long. He grabbed Lucy, just above her bad ankle, and pulled her back. He was saying something, sneering the words as he ripped her clothes out of the way and entered her roughly, but her head was pounding too loud to make sense of any of it.

Another rush of pain, almost drowned out by everything else, as the guard's thrusts grew faster and more haphazard. She let her head fall to the side, and that meant she was watching Theta but she couldn't find the energy to turn away.

The guard holding his wrists had his other hand clenched hard enough on Theta's jaw for his knuckles to have gone white, holding the alien's mouth open wide enough to thrust into it. Theta was choking, arching back against the onslaught as he dug his heels into the ground in a fruitless attempt to get leverage, the guard between his legs bent above him with a thick-fingered hand on one of his hips.

The guard raping his mouth loosened his grip on Theta's jaw for a second to readjust his fingers, and Theta, near-mindless with pain, bit down subconsciously on the intrusion. The guard roared in anger and pain, pulling out and grabbing his frills harshly. He slammed Theta's head back against the floor once— twice— three times with a horrid, awful crack, and Theta let out a quiet moan and stopped struggling as a pool of orange-red blood grew on the floor beneath him.

"Enough," the Master called. He sounded calm, but his voice filled the room and carried enough command that he was instantly obeyed.

Theta was making low, shallow wheezing noises, eyes glassy and staring unmoving at the ceiling, and Lucy was brought slightly out of her daze by the sharp scent of blood. There was a lot of it.

Lucy heard the Master's businesslike footsteps as he came down the stairs, casually, taking his time. She closed her eyes as he knelt next to Theta's head. She didn't want to see him.

"Oh, the irony," the Master sighed to himself. She heard his clothes shift as he stood, and he fired a callous, "Might want to focus on a thicker skull this round, Theta. Now hurry up and get the light show over with, I haven't got all day."

Lucy opened her eyes blearily. She saw what he'd meant; golden sparks were dancing over Theta's skin, flowing from the head wound, and she saw him shudder and twitch as they started to take effect.

He tried to speak but couldn't quite manage it, reaching towards her instead.

The guard had finished with her by now. It hurt to move, but she half-crawled to Theta's side anyway. She, at least, wasn't dying.

"I'm here," she said, as gently as she could. Her voice couldn't quite remember how to work.

Theta was having spasms, tiny little convulsions that screwed his face up with pain. He opened his mouth, tried to tell her something, but couldn't seem to form words, so he grabbed her loose hair with surprising strength, and hauled her almost on top of him, kissing her deeply.

She yelped and pulled away, or tried to; it was hard with him holding her firmly in place. Her hand slipped on a slick of blood and she had a moment of profound misery and desperation, if _Theta_ was doing this to her she was truly alone, she had no right to feel betrayed but somehow she'd hoped they could be on the same side now…

He broke the kiss, falling back to the floor with a painful sound and a hiss of pain; golden sparks jumped at his lips and she realised with a shock they were on her own as well. A strange tingling feeling spread first to the gash on her forehead and then throughout the rest of her body, and she could feel torn skin knitting itself together, bones snapping back into place and mending themselves, the pounding in her head lessening and lessening until finally she stopped hurting.

She blinked slowly and took a long, deep breath, revelling in the sensation of being _whole_ again. Even the aches and stiffness of a long string of sleepless nights seemed to be gone. She hoped the light sparking and flowing over Theta was doing as much for him.

It didn't look like it. Rather than a dizzying rush of relief with twinges of pain here and there as bones set and torn skin pulled itself back into place, Theta looked like he was burning up from the inside out. She wondered if something had maybe gone wrong, if the head injury meant he couldn't control whatever healing power he had. The light pulsed with more power than Lucy could imagine ever holding back, growing brighter and brighter until it obscured his features entirely, until it hurt her eyes to look at, and then it faded back into his skin.

He looked different, after she could see him again, though she had trouble figuring out what exactly the difference was. He looked as alien as ever. It was only when she saw past the frills and the inhuman colours she realised he'd changed, his face like an imperfect forgery. His eyes were a little larger, the auxiliary four on more of a slant than they'd been. His face was longer and a bit thinner, and his frills didn't lay as flat as they had.

"...Theta?" she asked.

He didn't have a chance to respond. The Master had bounced to his feet again, back on the balcony, and clapped his hands for attention.

"Welcome back, Theta," he said brightly, "And allow me to welcome your newest regeneration to the world. We're going to have _so_ much fun together, my dear. Lucy," he continued smoothly. "You poor _sweet_ girl." His eyes had that kind of loving look that she had learned very recently to be terrified of. "You've had such a rough week. And you know I hate it when we quarrel, love. Guards," he said kindly, "Please escort my wife somewhere nothing else untoward will happen to her."

Lucy really didn't like the sound of that. It didn't sound angry or threatening, which meant she was probably right to be terrified.

One of the guards near the door crossed the room briskly, and she let herself relax, if only a bit. She'd been afraid one of their tormentors might be given custody of her, and… She swallowed with difficulty. She wasn't very brave. She didn't want that to happen.

"With me, ma'am," the guard said professionally, taking her by the upper arm and steering her carefully towards the door. She noticed that he was being careful with her, keeping her moving and his guard up but not being needlessly rough the way some of the others were. She wished she knew his name. Not all the guards here were monsters. Most were just doing their jobs.

"Where are we going?" she asked him. Behind them, the Master clapped for attention again, and she stopped and looked back automatically.

" _Keep moving,"_ the guard said, and she was confused by his sudden intensity until she realised that the Master had already seemingly forgotten about them, turning back to the transformed Theta and the three guards who still surrounded him.

"As you were," said the Master cheerfully. Lucy started to cry out in protest, but her guard suddenly squeezed her arm tightly, making her gasp instead, and dragged her forcibly out of the room.

"But Theta—!" she said frantically as she was marched down the metal hallways. Once they were out of sight of the main deck his grip on her arm loosened a bit.

"Isn't your problem right now," the guard said, his voice calm and level. He stopped at a door with an electronic keypad, punching in a long code, each digit followed by a high-pitched beep that made her wince.

The door swung open, and inside the room there was nothing. A heavy darkness, like the opposite of light rather than the lack of it. The guard steered her inside and she felt sick when she crossed the threshold, the air thick and dead in her mouth. She knew, logically, that she was standing on a floor, but she couldn't feel anything beneath her bare feet.

The guard closed the door behind her and she turned back to it to get out—she couldn't stay here—but when she reached out she couldn't find the wall.

* * *

Theta wished there had been some other way.

Ey'd tried to warn Lucy, explain, at least _ask_ , but hadn't… quite… been able to speak, and the pain and confusion and _pain_ and the rush of far too much blood had been taking their toll too quickly. In the end Theta had been forced to make the transfer of regenerative energy the only way ey knew how, before it was too late and ey lost eir chance.

Ey wasn't proud of it; Lucy had struggled against em and through the contact Theta could feel the terror and betrayal in her mind. Ey had tried to project peacefulness but couldn't manage to bring up the feeling in eir own mind to do so. With no way for em to explain before they ran out of time, ey'd pulled her down and hoped she'd come to forgive em.

At least she was out of the way for now. Whatever the Master had planned for her—and Theta knew in eir hearts that he _did_ have a plan, that malevolent spark in his eyes was all too chillingly familiar—she was safe for now, and not in pain at least, and that was really all Theta could do at the moment because ey was curled in a ball on the floor of the Valiant, cringing and waiting for the Master's next word.

It came quickly enough, a clap and a bright "As you were!" and for one brief moment Theta hoped he was ordering the guards back to their posts, before a human-hot hand pried eir fingers loose from eir shins, forcing em out of eir defensive foetal position. The Master sighed, exasperated. "And finish up quickly, will you, I have a schedule to keep."

The guards took him at his word. It was over in minutes, this time, and the regenerative energy dancing over the new, fresh tears and bruises meant it didn't even hurt for very long. The last to finish used eir mouth, making Theta gag and leaving em coughing and retching on the floor. It was stained with blood and other fluids and Theta wondered, for a moment, who would have to clean it; ey hoped it wouldn't be Tish.

"Well," the Master called, skipping down the steps. "If you're all _quite_ done having fun, Theta and I have work to do." He grabbed Theta's elbow, pulling em to eir feet roughly. "You," he ordered one of the door guards. "Get that pretty little maid _this_ one loves so much up here. Tell her to clean up this mess."

Theta had time as the Master pulled em, stumbling, down the halls of the Valiant to spare a thought for Tish. It was the last coherent thought ey would have for a very long time.

There was nothing so much like a dungeon on the Valiant, no stone and dirt and tiny, barred windows, but the bowels of the ship had a similar feeling about them, the slight vibrations of the walls from engines and cooling systems lending a sinisterness that couldn't easily be explained. The air was dirty down here, the rooms dimly-lit with a red-orange glow that reminded Theta obscenely of home.

One of the guards—only two, now; Theta wasn't sure where the third had gone—chained eir ankle to a pipe, giving em about a metre in which to move, and the Master squatted down beside em, laying a comforting hand on eir shoulder. Theta flinched.

"Now," the Master said, in the voice of a friendly adult explaining how a vaccination worked to a frightened child. "This is going to hurt for a little bit, okay, Theta? You tried to do something very wrong and you need to learn not to do it again. But then it'll be over and things will be much better after that, you'll see. You can see your friends again and as long as you behave this will never have to happen again."

Theta wasn't entirely sure what happened next, the next hours blurring together with pain and fear and the Master's voice: _It's alright, you're nearly done with this part, you're doing_ so well _, Theta, hush now._

"This is for your own good, you know that, right?" he said at one point.

One of the guards had a sharp knife and a steady hand and Theta was trembling as ey tried to make eir voice work. "P-please," ey managed, "make— _ah!_ Make t-them stop."

The Master's grip tightened dangerously over the pressure-point in Theta's shoulder and ey gasped in pain. The guards didn't stop; the cuts only became deeper and more ragged. Regenerative energy sparked over the cuts too quickly, skin closing over metal to be torn open again a moment later. The knife went between eir legs and Theta screamed again, voice hoarse and torn. Eir throat had all but given up on healing; it had forgotten what it meant to not be raw from screaming.

"Almost, Theta," the Master said gently. "I'm very proud of you. Do you understand why they had to punish you?"

"Yes," ey rasped. "I'm sorry, Master."

"And you won't do it again?"

Theta sobbed and whimpered, shaking eir head frantically.

"Shh…" the Master stroked eir frills comfortingly. "I know you won't. Now, these men have been working very hard for a very long time and I think they deserve a reward. So be good and give it to them, and then we'll go and see Lucy."

Theta didn't have the energy (or the inclination, considering the Master's promises of finally being _done_ ) to attempt to fight the guards off. Too-hot fingers curled into em, pulling apart blood-sticky folds of skin, to be quickly replaced with a longer, thicker thing that Theta wished ey wasn't so well acquainted with.

The Master stood up, brushing off his suit with an air of distaste, and Theta flinched as ey felt the guard's breath against eir skin.

This time the guards didn't rush. The regenerative energy was beginning to slow, fading as the hours ticked by. It didn't heal em as fast anymore.

"Begging already, alien boy?" the first snarled in response to an almost-inaudible 'please'. "Girl? Can't tell. You're a good enough fuck to be one, though."

The second laughed harshly. "No tits," he said, running a hand over Theta's flat chest, pinching the skin where a nipple would have been, "but it's got a cunt, so that's close enough. Like fucking a kid."

"Nah," the first said, "a kid wouldn't be this tight."

Theta gave a long, pitiful whimper, and they laughed.

"It whines like a bitch," the first one commented, and his friend punctuated it with a guffaw and a haphazard slash at Theta's arm that only a few halfhearted sparks of regenerative energy attempted to heal. "And running out of magic!" he added with a sneer. "Now we can give it something to remember us by."

Theta didn't know what word the guard was cutting into eir skin, unable to concentrate well enough to turn shocks of pain into letters, and ey didn't particularly want to know, not after hearing the Master's vague, approving murmur.

"It's not crying," the one with the knife noted once he'd finished carving up Theta's ribcage, a hand wrapped loosely around his erection. "I bet it _likes_ it," he said, digging the blade into bone and making Theta shriek. "Do you like it, slut?"

Theta shook eir head frantically, but the first grabbed at eir frills, forcing em still.

"Go on, admit it, you little bitch. You know you like it," he said, nearly pulling out only to ram his hips forward again once the flicker of involuntary relief showed on eir face. "I want to hear you _say_ it."

"I—" Theta gasped, "I like it, _please…_ " The rest of the plea cut off, turning into a broken sob, but that seemed to be all the guard needed. He jerked once with a grunt, gave a few halfhearted thrusts in the aftershocks, and shoved Theta roughly away from him. Ey curled into a shivering ball, pressing against the Master's feet, silently begging for some form of protection.

He gave it. Placing a gentle hand on Theta's head, he held out the other with an open palm, halting the second guard. "That's enough," he said evenly. "You're dismissed."

The second guard looked like he was about to complain. He glanced at the Master and quickly got over it.

"There, Theta," the Master said, stroking eir frills tenderly. "It's over. No more nasty humans hurting you. You're safe with me. I promise. Cross my hearts," he added, and drew a familiar X over Theta's chest at the same time as his own, an almost-forgotten tic from childhood when they would tie promises by crossing each other's hearts.

"Thank you, Master," Theta whispered.

The Master stayed petting eir frills until the shaking stopped and eir breathing started to return to normal.

"Come along, Theta," he said finally, pulling em to eir feet. He was careful as he did it; no rough handling now, no hard grip or careless pulling. He treated Theta like something precious and soft, and it was the most wonderful feeling ey had experienced in this body. "Let's get you dressed and cleaned up, and then Lucy can come and see you."


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: torture, abuse, sensory deprivation, misgendering, stockholm syndrome, rape trauma syndrome.

"There," the Master said, satisfied. "Wonderful. Doesn't it feel nice to be back in Gallifreyan robes, Theta?"

"Yes, Master." Theta's voice was still rough. Ey wondered if it would ever fully recover. Ey doubted it. But the robes _did_ feel good. Awkward and too thin for eir liking, and Theta had always hated wearing anything Gallifreyan, and the Master's seal embroidered on the sleeves felt wrong, _so_ wrong. But they were warm and soft and enveloping, and after the horrible exposure and the cold and humiliation, being back in eir robes was the best thing Theta had ever experienced.

It was even better than the long, hot bath the Master had given em, gently sponging the blood and sweat and… other things… away from eir skin, placing cool washcloths over the worst of the injuries and letting the gorgeous heat wash over Theta until ey almost fell asleep from the warmth and exhaustion.

"None of that, Theta!" the Master had laughed, and he hadn't even sounded angry like Theta had been afraid he would. "You'll sleep well tonight. Not yet, though. We still have things to do today."

Theta's fingers curled in the fabric of the sleeves. Ey didn't want to seem ungrateful, the Master had been so kind to em and ey hadn't deserved it at all. "May I see Lucy now?" ey asked, hating the way eir voice sounded, cracked and barely audible. "It's only that you said…" Ey fidgeted anxiously; the dull ache of movement helped to ground em.

"I did, didn't I?" said the Master, like he had forgotten. Maybe he had; this regeneration of his seemed to lack a certain level of object permanence. Out of sight, out of mind. "Huh. I seem to have misplaced her," he continued, patting his pockets.

Theta gaped for a moment before schooling eir expression into something more mild; the Master noticed it, but he smiled placatingly, flicking eir chin in an air of playfulness.

"That was a joke, Theta. You _do_ know what those are, don't you?"

"Yes, Master."

"Oh, good. I'd hate for you to have forgotten. Certain of your regenerations have had a bit of a problem in that area, after all; there's precedent. Of course you can see Lucy, Theta. And you asked so politely, too! Quick learner." He nodded appreciatively.

Theta fumbled over eir tongue for a moment. "...Thank you, Master."

The Master patted eir cheek with approval before skipping over to the door. "Guard!" he called. There were swift, clicking footsteps in the corridor, and Theta's hearts picked up into a fever beat. Ey cringed back into the corner as a helmeted guard snapped to attention at the door; ey would have hidden completely if the Master hadn't been there, but he wouldn't let them hurt Theta without a reason.

"Fetch my wife," he instructed him pleasantly. "It hasn't been a full eighteen hours yet but Theta asked so prettily my gentle hearts just can't bear to make them wait."

Theta knew ey should probably say thank you again, but the guard was _right there_ and ey could only give a quiet mental whimper of gratitude and hope the Master picked up on it. Otherwise ey might draw the attention of the guard. Theta never wanted to draw the attention of a guard ever again. Ey remembered how ey'd used to tease them with Tish and felt vaguely ill. At least once the guard left eir heartsbeat went mostly back to normal.

"Theta." The Master's voice was mild, but Theta straightened immediately anyway. "You know I expect you to keep yourself healthy." He nodded to a small silver food cart sitting unobtrusively in the corner, and Theta's mouth started to water as the scent finally registered. "You haven't eaten in hours. Lucy will take a few minutes to get here. Eat, go on. Slowly," he admonished preemptively. "Don't make yourself sick, I'll be very disappointed in you."

Theta only hesitated for a moment before picking up the small bowl of porridge. Ey was starving, had only really become aware of it when ey had smelled the cinnamon, but the Master's warning kept em from devouring it, and ey could feel his eyes on em as ey poured milk over the warm oats. Eir first meal in eir new body; Theta could definitely have done worse. It was simple, but it wasn't flavourless, and eir stomach probably couldn't have handled more than that besides. Ey couldn't even finish the bowl.

"Very good," the Master praised. "You can have more later if you keep that down. You're doing very well. And just in time!" he exclaimed as they heard the guard returning. Theta suddenly regretted the porridge, hand shaking badly as ey set the bowl back down and fought not to be ill.

Most of eir reaction was sick fear at the sight of the guard. The rest was shock at Lucy's condition.

She didn't look like she'd been hurt, no more than before Theta had healed her; the blood on her jacket was long dried and Gallifreyan by the look of it. She was barefoot, she'd lost her shoes back in the throne room, but her bruises and cuts were gone and her head wound had closed; the matted rust-coloured patch in her hair was superficial only, no fresh blood to speak of, the cut itself and the concussion it had likely caused faded and healed. Physically, Lucy Saxon was the picture of rather bloody health.

But she was in agony.

Her sprained ankle had to be healed by now, but she stumbled and tripped over nothing and seemed to have lost all sense of equilibrium. She _couldn't_ be concussed, but her eyes were screwed shut and when she opened them to try to see where she was going they were bloodshot and out of focus and she gave a strangled cry of pain. The sound made her cringe and stumble again, clinging to her ears so hard she in danger of drawing blood. The guard caught her before she crumpled to her knees, and a horrible wail escaped her throat before she choked and shuddered. There were bloody lines down her face like scratches, and Theta's blood ran cold when ey saw the blood drying under her fingernails. It was as if she'd been clawing at her eyes and _missed._ She looked like she'd gone mad.

Theta tried to call out to her, but the guard was still there and the words were stuck in eir throat and ey was shaking and, oh, wasn't that pathetic? The so-called _Doctor_ couldn't help someone ey cared about, who desperately needed assistance, because ey were too _afraid_ , and of something that had been completely deserved as it was.

Whatever Lucy had been through, she certainly hadn't deserved it, Theta was sure of that.

"Lucy!" the Master exclaimed. She gave a gasping moan and tried weakly to back away from him. The guard gripped her shoulder. It wasn't rough or harsh, only a professional warning; but she spasmed like he'd stuck her with a knife, crumpling into a ball, and her mouth moved in a soundless scream like the simple act had been torture.

"Oops!" said the Master unapologetically, without lowering his voice. "I forgot. He poked Lucy with his foot, making her suck an agonised breath through her teeth and let it out in a shuddering sob.

"Master," Theta asked in a whisper. Maybe if ey didn't look at the guard, they wouldn't notice em. "What happened to her?"

"Nothing!" the Master answered with a cheerful clap. Lucy tightened her death-grip on her ears, and the guard walked away. Theta could breathe a bit easier. "Absolutely… nothing." There was a malicious glint in his eyes that said _work it out, Theta._

It took a few seconds, but Theta did.

"No," ey said weakly. "You… Master you _wouldn't."_

"Wouldn't I?"

Theta dropped eir voice to a whisper. "How _long?"_

Ey could recognise the symptoms of prolonged sensory deprivation. The chambers had been intended as a medical last resort; a modified Zero Room that blocked any and all sensory input in almost every species in the universe. A patient in a sensory deprivation chamber would feel no pain, be bothered by no noise or light. But they were _dangerous_. It was no wonder Lucy had clawed her face until it bled. Complete sensory deprivation meant _complete_ ; the chamber was designed to block the brain itself from registering any sensory input whatsoever. Lucy could scream until her throat bled and never hear her own voice; she could break her leg thrashing in a panic and not only never feel the pain but never feel her limbs moving at all. Her automatic functions would continue, but she wouldn't be able to _feel_ her heart beating, her lungs moving. It rarely took more than a few minutes for a patient who was unaware of the nature of the chamber to begin to panic.

And it was _terrifying._ Theta felt cold at the very thought. There was nothing to hold onto in a sensory deprivation chamber, not even your own body. It was very much like floating as a disembodied mind. There would be no distractions, none at all, from your own thoughts; on Gallifrey that had occasionally been used, under extremely controlled circumstances and with multiple safeguards and emergency personnel outside, as meditation aides for the very devout. No session was ever permitted to last longer than an m-span; most lasted less than half that. The utter aloneness and unbearable silence could drive even a Time Lord mad after too long, and they still had a link to the hivemind. A human consciousness, so long alone…

"Master," ey said again, marginally louder, beginning to panic. "How long was she _in there?"_

"Oh," said the Master, looking at his nails with disinterest, "only about seventeen hours."

" _Only—_!"

The Master tutted. "Yes, only. It would have been longer, if you hadn't asked, and I could always send her back. You wouldn't want that, would you?" he asked lightly.

Theta shook eir head. The Master raised an eyebrow. "No, Master," ey said, "I'm sorry, Master."

"I know you are, my dear."

Theta stood in the corner awkwardly for a few moments, twisting eir hands into the voluminous robes. "May I help her, Master?"

"What?" said the Master, his toys already forgotten for the moment. "Oh, fine, go ahead."

Theta took a breath; ey couldn't understand why he was being so generous even after eir recalcitrance, but ey was going to take advantage of the hospitality while it lasted. "Thank you, Master." Ey stepped toward Lucy carefully.

* * *

Everything hurt.

Lucy squeezed her eyes shut and held onto her ears and it _hurt_ , her skin felt like it was on fire just from the feeling of the air touching it and her clothes were like steel wool on her skin and it _hurt_ but the light and the noise hurt more.

She'd screamed… she'd thought she'd screamed… she'd _tried_ screaming… for hours, or days, or years. She'd been alone, so incredibly alone, and she couldn't see or hear and so she'd tried to take a deep, calming breath and focus, because this was just the Master toying with her.

That was when she'd started to panic. Unable to tell if she was breathing, unable to tell if she was even _alive_ , to feel anything at all… She had no idea how long she'd been in that living hell. It felt like it had been forever.

And now the light burnt her eyes even through her eyelids, she felt like she was staring directly at the sun and it _burnt_ and, oh, would staying in that room really have been so terrible? At least there she couldn't hurt. Now every tiny bit of friction from moving against air and clothes made her feel ill with pain, and there was dried blood cracking on her skin and every nerve in her body was _raw_ like it had been scoured and if speaking wasn't agony in every possible way she would be begging the Master to kill her.

She couldn't stand it anymore she couldn't live like this she _couldn't_ everything was too intense the scent of the carpet alone was powerful and cloying enough to fill the room and make her head swim, it was too _much_ after all those years in all that _nothingness_.

"...Lucy?"

The voice was quiet but it still grated like a foghorn or a dial-up tone, why couldn't everything just _shut up_ , this was like a migraine tenfold and the sound of light, clicking steps on the floor was like bullets being fired.

"Oh, Lucy…" The gentle whisper howled in her ears. She struggled to breathe through the pain, taking a deep, gasping breath. Her ribs scraped and stretch and felt like knives against the inside of her skin. She wondered if she'd gone insane, if this would never go away. The thought made her want to scream but she couldn't, it would hurt. "Lucy… can I touch you?" Even as Theta's voice beat against her skull like a hammer she could hear the tenderness in it, a rough but incredibly _gentle_ sound, like a lion's purr. But the thought of anything making contact with her overstimulated nerves made her feel sick. She tried to shake her head.

"Lucy," Theta said brokenly. "It will hurt but I can help you, I promise… you'll lose your mind if you go on like this…"

She wasn't sure how to tell Theta that she might not have a mind left to lose anymore.

"Tell me to stop, if it's too much," said Theta, placing cool hands on her head. She could feel the hard exoskeletal casings of the alien's fingers through her scalp like the weight of bricks even though there was barely any pressure, and it _hurt_ and she wanted to cry out for Theta to stop but then the pressure began to lessen.

There was a presence in her head, soft and non-threatening and unobtrusive, and she could feel the impression of thoughts and feelings not so much projected as offered up. Normally the sensation of having another person _in her head_ would have made her panic even more; but some of the pain was beginning to slowly fade away. Her breathing was still painfully sensitive but she no longer felt like she was being ground to dust by her light clothes, and the unbearable blinding light was dimming to a normal, dull red through her eyelids. It was as if the presence in her head—and Theta's mind felt strange, pained but comforting, and neither male nor female, not like when the Master had broken into her mind, there had been an overpowering sense of masculinity that time—was reaching out and slowly turning down the dial on her senses.

She gave a long, low whimper, and it hurt her throat but not her ears, so she carefully uncovered them. She risked opening her eyes—

_Ow._ No. Eyes were not something she was ready for yet. Theta's mind did something odd, almost like a mental flinch, and she felt it open up a little wider, and a rush of disorderly thoughts slip through before it closed up quickly again, so as not to hurt her. _Sorry sorry hurrying done almost sorry breathe._

Finally the light behind her eyes stopped hurting and the sensation of Theta's cold hands on her head was comforting rather than painful, and when she opened her eyes a second time— _sorry finish okay_ —the glow of the lamp on the side table didn't glare. Theta helped her up, and he (they? something else?) was shaking with the effort but supported her weight anyway, leading her to the chair to sit.

"Shh," Theta breathed, holding her close. She clung to the front of the thick, soft robes, white-knuckled like she would be torn away at any instant. She didn't know if the Master was still there or if he'd left, and she didn't care; all that mattered was that Theta was warm and soft and gentle and _cared_ and she held on because it was the only thing keeping her breathing. "You're safe now," said Theta in that heartbreakingly tender voice. "You've been so brave, Lucy, hush… it's all right… you're all right…"

She finally let herself cry, and Theta pulled her close and made sure she didn't break.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: xenophobia, misgendering, torture, references to rape.

The A406 was in good condition, which meant that it was basically useless for Martha's purposes (unless she wanted to thumb a ride with some of the Master's security and straight to her execution) so she had to take a longer route to get to the Chiswick Resistance Group, down sidestreets off Ascot Avenue and ducking behind unkempt bushes in the fronts of the houses near Uni West London from the rounds made by security and Toclafane.

Gunnersfield Park gave her trouble, having been turned into a base of operations for the military; the huge, open spaces wouldn't have been any help to her anyway, but at least if they hadn't been crawling with the Master's soldiers she'd not have had to go through the forest and the old South Ealing Cemetary in the middle of the night. She might not be easily frightened, but there were more preferable locations, with less spiders and other assorted distasteful things.

That little adventure had put her off by another hour, and she couldn't afford to waste time, not if she wanted to get to CRG before daybreak. Luckily she made good time after that, able to for the most part follow the path of Bollo Ln once she got past Stirling House—that had entailed a mad dash across South Acton Park she had no desire to ever repeat, only managing to not be caught by a small contingent of Toclafane thanks to the TARDIS key—and got to Turnham Green Terrace, full of boarded-up businesses and abandoned cars bearing peeling ATMOS stickers, by no later than 0400. A sign for traffic enforcement cameras at the corner gave her pause, but someone standing under the subdued awning of what proclaimed to be the Chiswick Chiropractic Clinic waved her over quickly.

"Martha Jones?" he asked.

"Number Thirteen sent me," she whispered back. "Are you CRG?"

"We sure are," he said, ushering her through the door into what had once been a reception area. It still was one, of a sort—stacks of paperwork on the countertop, and a woman typing up something at her workstation, swivelling her chair around to pick up the newly-printed papers and add them to the stack.

"That her, then?" the woman asked, pushing brilliant red hair impatiently out of her face.

"Martha Jones, ma'am," said Martha, sketching a quick salute before leaning on a filing cabinet to catch her breath.

"Oy, she salutes!" the woman exclaimed. "Why don't you lot salute?"

"Well I could go outside and try again," the man who'd brought Martha in suggested with a grin. Something about his easy confidence and wide smile reminded Martha of Clyde.

The woman rolled her eyes. "Ignore Mickey," she said, standing and offering a hand. "Donna Noble, coordinator, Chiswick Resistance. You already met that one," she said with a fair amount of exasperation, waving a hand in Mickey's general direction. He flipped her a cheerful V. "And if he doesn't show some _respect_ he can organise the records room again!"

"I just organised it last week!" Mickey protested.

Donna ignored him. "Mum's upstairs sleeping," she said in a tone of voice that suggested she was perfectly happy with the arrangement and would like it to remain that way for as long as possible. "And granddad's… Granddad, where are you?" she called into the back. "It's Martha Jones out here!"

"All right, all right, I'm coming! It's not easy to get around back here, you know? And if you're not careful you'll wake your mother, does the, uh, does she want any tea? I think we've got some left, in the packs…"

Martha couldn't help smiling at the old man. He had the same look about him as the rest of the world; the same look Martha knew _she_ had. Tense and drawn, tired, eyes filled with loss and pain and the sight of too many dead, too many starving children and broken families. But there was hope, there, as well, and a spirit that was far from broken. More beautiful than anything, there was even a sort of resilient cheerfulness, a sort of 'well we'd better make the best of it' positivity as he edged carefully into the room with several precariously-full mugs of black coffee.

There was love in every line of his face, and Martha felt for the first time since the Utopia project like she was _home._

"This is my granddad," Donna said, warmly and unnecessarily, as the man bustled into the room and carefully set down his sloshing mugs of coffee. She moved the files off her desk with the air of having had similar mugs spilled on them countless times before.

"Wilfred Mott, at your service," the man said. His voice was kind but intense, and he gripped her hand tightly in both of his as he shook it. "We've heard all the stories, we have, my girl Donna's been tracking you as best she could, see… only she's been reversing the latitude and longitude, in case we're ever raided, it's happened before but we managed to get everyone out. Bannerman Road warned us just in time, God bless them."

Martha hid a wide smile. _Good on you, Sarah Jane._

"But here, you don't want to listen to an old man!" Wilfred exclaimed, turning about and seeming to look for something in the scattered piles and randomly-placed filing cabinets. "Donna, where have you put the key this time? Good lord, I can't find anything in this mess…"

"It's right there, Wilf," Mickey called from his position near the door. There was a desk that was only half-covered in boxes of papers, and he seemed to have claimed it as his roost. It was a good place, allowed a decent view of the street with almost no exposure. Martha felt her interest pique. She wondered if Mickey was ex-military.

Wilfred finally located the key, which was large and brass and hanging prominently on a peg on the wall. "You want to see the others, right?" he said, bustling over to a bookcase in the wall. "That just goes to the records room," he said carelessly, waving a hand at the door leading upstairs.

"Records of what?" asked Martha.

"Everything!" Donna replied with a smug grin. "Troop movements, medical convoys, safe houses, refugee caravans, food supply trains on both sides, Resistance camps… Been tracking your movements too, based on hearsay."

Martha was understandably horrified. "And you lot keep _all that,"_ she said slowly, "Typed out, in _one house?_ And you don't think that's _dangerous?"_

"Would be," said Donna carelessly. "If any of it was true."

"We're planting false information," Mickey explained. "Donna's brilliant at making it look official. Sometimes we intercept their messengers and give them false numbers so they don't realise we've been stealing their food. We've set up some fake safe houses all around the country. The Master raids them, finds all these detailed maps and descriptions and instructions for things that don't exist. They've wasted months trying to find the entrance to a massive underground bunker in Scotland that isn't there."

Martha found herself grinning. "That's brilliant!"

Donna gave a little half-shrug that practically screamed _I know._ "Best temp in Chiswick," she informed Martha, pointing helpfully at herself.

" _Good morning, peoples of Earth!"_

"Oh, not again," Mickey groaned as they all turned toward the ancient television set in the corner.

"... _and welcome to Day 179 of our glorious march toward conquest!"_

"Is it him again? What's happened this time?"

Martha jumped; the tight-faced woman had emerged from a bookcase right behind her without making a sound.

"We don't know, mum," Donna said. "Listen."

"I don't want to listen," her mother said tersely. "Turn it off, Donna, why do you watch these things?"

The others shushed her.

A close-up of the Master's smiling face, as always. "Bright and early! Isn't the sunrise just beautiful? I love Earth sunrises. So much prettier than Gallifrey's." He winked. "Of course they'd be, now, regardless. Wouldn't they, Theta?"

The camera zoomed out to show more of the dais, and specifically the person sitting beside him on the floor. "Yes, Master," the Doctor murmured, not looking up from the floor. His voice seemed different beyond the brokenness.

Wilf sighed. "Poor thing."

"Anyway!" the Master continued brightly. "We've got a special show for you today, subjects! My wife and dear, darling Theta have been looking _so_ very forward to it, and I'm sure you'll all appreciate it as well."

The Doctor looked up at the Master, just for a moment, before turning his gaze back to the floor.

"Well?" said the Master. "Aren't you going to explain why, Theta?"

Martha could barely make out the Doctor's reply, a quiet, emphatic " _There are children watching_."

"Aaah. Well, how about I put it in words they can understand, if you can't manage it. You see," he said, directed back to the camera and his viewers, his voice pitched up like he was trying to engage an infant, "some of the guards have been very _mean_. They hurt Theta." He looked back to the Doctor, his voice retaining the childish cadence. "Are they bad men, Theta?"

"Yes."

"Do they deserve to be hurt?" the Master continued.

Martha smiled a bit, waiting for the inevitable blistering speech.

"…Yes," the Doctor said reluctantly, so quietly Martha wasn't sure if he'd actually _said_ it or just mouthed it.

" _Good_ Theta," the Master said, like he was praising a pet for having done a new trick. "Now, last one: are you better than them?"

"No."

"Are you _sure_? They hurt Lucy too, Theta. You'd never hurt Lucy just because you could, would you?"

"No, Master!" the Doctor said, the first real emotional reaction he'd had, muted but definitely extant.

"Then you _are_ better than them?" the Master said curiously.

The Doctor faltered, clearly disagreeing but for whatever reason unwilling to speak out against the Master.

"I don't trust that creature," Donna's mother said in a harsh stage whisper. "Never have. It's in the Master's pocket, I can tell you that much."

There were any number of things Martha wanted to say to _that_ , but she'd heard similar doubts almost every time she stopped somewhere. She'd gotten good at calming them.

It came as a surprise that this time, she didn't have to.

"He is not!" Mickey snapped from the doorway, interrupting Donna's " _Mum!"_ and Wilfred's sad protest. "He's being tortured or something up there, but he'd _never_ work for the Master!"

Martha turned to him in shock. "You know…?"

"Quiet, quiet now," Wilfred said urgently. Mickey gave Martha a look. _We'll talk later._ "That terrible man's speaking again, quiet."

They'd apparently missed the Doctor's reply. "Oh, I knew you'd come to see it my way eventually, Theta," the Master smiled. "Now, go on!" he continued, still in that bright, grating tone, waving his hands in a motion which said much of the same.

The Doctor stood carefully, almost daintily, holding up the hem of his robes so as not to step on them. He looked back at the Master, who nodded his approval, before ascending the staircase, still holding the hem of his robes. Beneath them his feet were bare, the same dark, almost brownish shade of orange that his fingers had, which Martha recognised as more of the… She hesitated to call it an exoskeleton, even in her head. She had no idea if it was really an exoskeleton, after all, even if that's what it looked like, or even if it was a part of the Doctor's body. It might be some artificial protective casing, the Gallifreyan version of shoes and gloves.

The camera panned to follow the Doctor's movements as he hesitantly picked a silvery object up from a side table, glancing back at the Master for confirmation that he was doing the right thing. Receiving it, he seemed slightly more confident but still horribly tense, walking towards the centre of the deck.

As he did, the figures there came into view of the camera. Two human men, manacled at wrist and ankle and chained to each other, seemed remarkably unconcerned with their prospects even as two guards stood off to the side, guns at the ready.

"Whenever you're ready, Theta," the Master called from his balcony, glancing idly at his fingernails.

The Doctor looked anything but ready. He was shaking with terror the nearer he got to the guards, and the knife—an old-fashioned straight razor by the look of it, small and sharp and quick—trembled so badly it looked like it might vibrate out of his hand.

Martha had a horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach where this was heading, and glancing around the room quickly she saw she wasn't the only one. Wilf had a hand over his mouth, and everyone seemed to have similar, gaping expressions. Even Donna's mother looked concerned.

When he'd gotten close enough to the men to reach out to them, he was shaking so badly the knife, reflecting the overheads, looked like nothing so much as a strobe light.

"M-Master," he stammered, and Martha felt something break inside her at the helplessness in his pleading voice.

The Master just looked bored. "Do get on with it, Theta, we don't have all day. These people have work to do, you're throwing them off-schedule. Awfully rude of you."

"I think it's scared of us," taunted one of the bound men. The other, who appeared to be slightly less monumentally stupid, said nothing.

The Doctor whispered something inaudible. The guard laughed.

"What was that, bitch? Couldn't hear you. Did you say you wanted Round Two? 'Cause let me tell you, I don't need my hands to—"

The Doctor—or maybe he really was just Theta now—gave a piercing, inhuman shriek, and there was all of a sudden a lot of blood and the guard screamed and twitched and the razor was yanked out of his face with a squelching sound that Martha would remember forever, however hard she tried to forget it. She thought his throat might have been slit for good measure as he fell, but there was already blood pouring from his face and his temples and she didn't even know how such an elegant-looking little knife hadn't broken with the force of the Doctor-Theta's frenzied stabbing, but by the time the guard's throat was cut he was most definitely dead already.

An expression that might have been the ancient, predatory ancestor of a smile played on Theta's face (there was none of the Doctor there) and he enunciated clearly, sharply: "Round Two."

The second man finally looked worried. He tried to scramble away, and Martha saw the blood drain from his face as he realised he was bound hand and foot to his dead partner. "Hey," he stammered frantically. "Hey, look, I'm sorry, okay—"

"No you're not." Theta said, crouching beside him animalistically. His propriety had been abandoned like a shed skin, the hems of his robes stained with blood. "You should know better than to try lying to a telepath."

Theta's hands weren't shaking as he made careful incisions on the man's neck and arms, and he might not have been a medical doctor but he certainly seemed to know how to avoid arteries, his blade flashing elegantly and red with less blood than there might have been.

"If I cut out your vocal cords, you wouldn't be able to," he said brightly. At the fear in his victim's eyes, he giggled, patting the man on the head placatingly. "Don't worry, I won't. I'd rather hear you scream."

"No," Martha whispered. "Doctor, don't…"

"As entertaining as this is," the Master said, "could you get on with it?"

Theta looked up at that, and nodded. He dug sharp, exoskeletal fingers into a deep cut in the man's arm to hear him scream before taking the blade to his throat, slitting it quickly. Theta held the hem of his robes as he stood, looking strangely composed for someone covered in the blood of the people they'd just killed. The composure didn't last for long as he looked at the two guards standing dispassionately a few metres away, and he made his way back to the Master's side quickly, hands shaking.

"Well, that's all, folks!" said the Master. "Thanks for tuning in!"

"They must have done something," Donna said hoarsely, staring at the now-blank screen. "He wouldn't… not without a _reason._ He always has a reason."

Her mother was less forgiving. "He had one," she said coldly. "His _master_ told him to."

"Sylvia, that's enough now!" Martha looked at Wilf in shock. There were tears in the old man's eyes, and the order had been harsher than she'd imagined he could ever sound. "You don't see it, you don't use your eyes, any of you, do you? Now I'm not saying what he did was right, but don't…" He looked around at all of them, tearful and confused. "Don't any of you realise what they were? What they did? And that scared little blonde girl too. So now maybe you're right," he said to Sylvia, righteous, heartbroken anger snapping in his eyes. "Maybe he shouldn't have killed those… those horrible men but there are things no one should have to go through. Sometimes a man breaks, that kind of pain." He looked around to find everyone watching him, and suddenly seemed to get self-conscious. He fussed briefly, glancing around and trying to redirect their attention, but having said his piece seemed unable to think of anything else.

"Well said, Wilf," said Mickey unexpectedly. Donna, silent for once, nodded and put a hand on her granddad's shoulder.

Sylvia drew herself up. "Well," she said, "I still think you're all mad. And you especially," she added, pointing at Martha. "Putting your trust in that _creature_."

"I don't," said Martha. "I put my trust in what he can be."

* * *

Theta was _still_ moping.

The Master sighed, running his fingers idly through their limp frills; Theta's frills always drooped something terrible when they were sad. He really should have anticipated this reaction. Most people would be grateful for the opportunity to turn the tables on their former torturers, but Theta still had vestiges of _the Doctor_ hanging about that were horrified at the bloodlust and the vicious rage Theta liked to pretend they didn't feel. Really. It had been _hours_. The guards had even cleaned all the blood up by now; it _had_ been the guards, rather than the servants, a pointed reminder of what would come of arrogance under his rule.

Anyway, it wasn't as if it had really been about Theta to begin with. He couldn't have his underlings thinking they could touch his pets and get away with it. Giving Theta the opportunity to get over their intense fear of the guards—one aspect of the regeneration-shaping that had gone a little _too_ well, he'd been trying to instill fear but not so much that Theta curled into a whimpering ball of terror whenever they so much as thought about a guard—had just been a perk. Two birds, one stone, as the humans would have put it. Stupid expression. He was going native.

Maybe it had been too soon, he thought with faint regret. He would have preferred for Theta to not be quite so… raw. The wounds were, possibly, too fresh. It had been over rather quickly, and Theta hadn't gotten the chance to _really_ savour it. Still, the little exercise had accomplished its purpose, and the guards were dead. They'd been crass, disgusting creatures. If the Master hadn't known he would need them someday when his pets inevitably betrayed him, he would have thrown them out an airlock the day he'd taken power. Tasteful sadism was one thing, but he didn't like _thugs._

Of course, thugs were useful things to have regardless of his opinion of them. He'd let the third guard live. There was always the chance that he'd need his services again someday, and the knowledge that he was still on the Valiant would keep Lucy in line better than a volt lash. She'd been getting quite worryingly defiant lately.

It was Theta's fault, of course. They had a certain way with human girls, something about them making them seem trustworthy. It was fascinating, really, and if he played his cards right (and there was another human expression. _Disgusting_ ) it could work in his favour, who knew? He put his hand on Theta's back, and when they latched onto his leg, snivelling, he hid the flash of irritation and schooled his expression to something comforting.

"Why don't you go wash up, Theta?" he asked lightly. "Get all of that icky human blood off of you."

When Theta looked up at him, their lip was quivering. They nodded uncertainly. "Yes, Master."

"Good Theta," he said with as much warmth as he could fake. He ruffled their frills and finally managed to get away, taking the steps two at a time to distance himself from the sickeningly genuine emotion rolling off Theta in waves. Lucy, too, even. Her telepathy was even weaker than her mind, but as simple as her emotions were they were strong enough to give him a headache.

The two of them latched onto each other as they left. They'd hardly stopped touching each other since Lucy had come back from the sensory deprivation chamber, some misplaced sense of thankfulness linking them. He'd woken in the middle of the night to find Lucy standing at the foot of the bed, trying to comfort Theta, shuddering in the midst of some nightmare. She'd not cared about them at all prior to this whole thing, he was quite sure.

The Master took a moment to check his reflection in an unobtrusive wall mirror. One of the guards had handed him a _very_ interesting memo a short while ago. He could hardly answer it looking less than his best.

The corridors of the Valiant were all sharp corners and hard metal, even in the formal areas with carpeting and drywall; you could _feel_ the metal and the power of the ship. They were echoey and identical and there were no shortcuts _anywhere_. Normally this might have annoyed him; when he wanted to be somewhere, he expected to be able to _get_ there with reasonable ease. Today, though, there was nothing that didn't make him feel powerful. Let the universe wait on his leisure. He would walk down the full length of every interconnecting corridor in order to reach his destination, and he would do it on his own time, and they could damn well wait for him. He was the Master. He would show up when he felt like it.

The drums thundered in agreement, and he pounded their four-beat pattern out against the walls—not covered in false drywall anymore, he'd left the formal suites and was making his way down the crew corridors. He liked the raw metal bulkheads and utilitarian lighting. They felt strong. Powerful.

A faint presence, red and raw with hatred and pain and desperation, clawed at the back of his mind. He brushed her aside, locked his shields down more fully—that was embarrassing, he was getting out of practice now that Theta had _killed everyone_ —and banged louder against the wall. It wasn't as if a timeship could _hear_ the defiant pounding (one, two, three, four), but it made him laugh.

Still. Fun as it might be, the laughter and drumming wouldn't make the impression he was aiming for on their guest. He stopped his playing ( _no point in being grown-up if you can't be childish sometimes, even a broken Doctor was right twice a day)_ to straighten himself out. Sleeves sharp, tie straight, collar even, jacket smooth, _twirl your wife, give her a kiss,_ and there we go.

The guards had been smart enough not to lock the door. He didn't like stopping to fiddle with bolts and keys when he had an _impression_ to make. If four armed guards couldn't handle a restrained prisoner, the prisoner _deserved_ to escape.

He made sure the doors clanged loudly as they opened. His prisoner didn't flinch, which intrigued him greatly, but she jumped, and that was more than enough to satisfy his inner grandstander.

"Good evening," he said cheerfully. "Welcome to the Valiant, Martha Jones. I look forward to extending my hospitality."


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: references to torture, references to rape, misgendering.

A day later, and she still had alien blood beneath her fingernails.

She'd scrubbed herself raw and it was still there no matter how much she scraped at it, dried and cracking orange-brown an awful reminder that he was dead. He must have been, nobody could survive losing that much blood; it was everywhere, a wide, clotting pool on the metal floor. There were thin trails of it on the steps, handprints on the floor… It was like a horror film, one of those gory slasher movies.

At least they'd not left his body there when she'd been sent to clean up the mess. She could imagine his lifeless eyes as she mopped it up, and that had been terrible enough, thinking of him blank and empty and shattered and…

Tish now had an hour blocked off in her morning and nothing to do with it. Her mother had told her to sleep, and she honestly didn't know why she wasn't following her advice. The… Saxon would find something to fill her schedule with soon enough, and she'd regret not taking advantage of this tiny bit of freedom while she had the chance. But something made her gravitate towards Theta's dressing room anyway, just as it had the day before—morbid sentimentality, due to the dead, maybe just a quiet sense of loss for the few moments of peace they'd shared together here. And she owed Theta. She owed him her life.

She swallowed a lump in her throat as she ran her fingers over a silky, embroidered sleeve. Theta had hated it here, hated it even more than her, but she was certain he hadn't wanted to _die_ , not even on the really bad days. He could have given her up; she was certainly much more at fault for the attempted assassination than he was, all Theta had done was tell her what aspirin would do, she'd been the one to deliver it. He could have said that and she would have died instead. He hadn't, though, and she didn't know why except that Martha had to have been right about him.

She blinked back unexpected tears. She could hardly have called Theta a friend. Could she? Certainly she'd cared about him, he was a broken helpless little thing, she could hardly have avoided feeling a bit protective; and he'd made her smile, one of the only people who could in this hellhole, and he'd stood up for her as best he could… Maybe Theta just didn't know how to have human friends. He'd tried, though. He hadn't been very human, hadn't always understood how emotions worked, but he'd been kind in his own way. Maybe he had been her friend. Maybe he hadn't. Either way he'd made her feel like she was worth _something_ , and she would miss him.

The door swung open. It didn't creak, nothing on the Valiant was ever in less than perfect condition, but it didn't need to to be terrifying. She spun around, expecting guards, or worse, Saxon—

No. No, she was hallucinating, this wasn't real, it _couldn't_ be real, ghosts didn't exist. But then, if she was going to crack and start seeing things, which really wasn't all that unlikely with everything going on, she doubted she'd hallucinate Lucy Saxon. Weren't you supposed to have visions of people you _wanted_ to see? And she'd certainly never imagine her looking so… concerned. Tender and pained, like she was worried about Theta for his own sake. She hovered as he tiptoed timidly through the door, looking like she wanted to put an arm around him, but didn't. Tish gained a small amount of respect for the woman. Theta didn't like being touched.

He looked like nothing more than a ghost, small and pale and his robes were covered in blood. It wasn't his own, red like a human's and staining the hems like he'd stood in it—maybe he had—and splattered on the sleeves in a way that ought to have been threatening. But he was pitiful, shaking and staring down at the floor, and she didn't think she could ever be afraid of him.

"H-hello, Tish," he whispered, like he was terrified to speak too loudly. Lucy Saxon took a few seconds from anxiously watching his face to give Tish a polite smile and a nod before looking back to Theta—an unconscious tic of a politician's wife.

"Oh my god," Tish breathed. "You're alive, you… how… You're not Theta," she said suddenly. "Or… did you do that thing, where you change?"

"Regeneration," Lucy Saxon said quietly.

"Yeah, that." Tish swallowed, looking this New Theta over carefully. He shrank away from her gaze, but she saw something in his eyes that reassured her. "It really is you, then? You're alive?"

"I'm not dead," said Theta.

And maybe it was because Theta was her friend after all and she'd thought he was dead but he wasn't, maybe it was just that there had been so much death and loss already, but Tish launched herself at him and hugged him as hard as she could.

He gasped almost soundlessly, flinching away from her and sinking to the floor, looking up at her like he was too scared to take his eyes off her.

"Oh god, oh god, I'm sorry, did I hurt you, are you alright, oh god, I'm sorry—" Of course he wasn't alright, part of her mind supplied even as the rush of words left her mouth, he'd just _died_ , he must be traumatised, how stupid _are_ you, Letitia?

It took her a moment to realise he was speaking too, a quiet litany of _please please I'm sorry please stop please_ and even as he was looking right at her she had the feeling he wasn't really, staring in fear at something long gone, lost in a living nightmare.

"What did I do?" she asked, even though she was certain he couldn't hear her.

"Nothing, Tish," Lucy Saxon said soothingly, kneeling next to Theta with a gentle hand between his shoulder blades, supporting him without restraining him. "It's not you. Theta was tortured by humans, ey's having trouble being around them right now. The Master's been reinforcing the link—mentally too, I think. Theta's going to need some time before you can touch em without making em panic." Her voice was calm, and she spoke the words like she'd recited them. She probably had. Still, it was a strange shift to see in Lucy Saxon of all people. "I'd… like to help you, if I can."

There were so many questions she had at that. Why was Theta afraid of _her_ but not Lucy, for one; why did Lucy suddenly _care_ about Theta, she never had before, why did she want to help, and what did 'reinforcing the link' mean, anyway? How long had Theta been tortured? By whom?

"Ey?" she said.

"Different body, different pronouns," Lucy explained.

"Ah," she said weakly, still absorbing everything. She could accept that, that wasn't the strangest thing she'd heard before by far. "Why do you want to help him—em?" she asked a moment later.

"Why do you?" Lucy asked.

Tish couldn't help but bristle at the question. _Because I_ care _about em. I was the one who made him feel safe, I wanted to give him something that felt normal, I don't care that ey's an alien…_

Somewhat belatedly, she understood the point.

Lucy was smiling at her; there was incredible pain behind that smile, something inside her that was broken and would never heal, and her eyes held shame and wariness and a kind of resignation, like she never expected to get anyone to smile back at her again.

Slowly, hesitantly, Tish smiled.

Lucy's eyes brightened, and the pain in her smile lessened just a bit. "Here, we've got to get em clean… Where do you keep eir chemises?"

"In the loo," she said.

"Can you get one? I'll get em out of these robes."

Theta whimpered and cringed as she passed, and Lucy murmured placations as she helped em out of eir bloody robes. Standing there in just the thin chemise, ey looked even more vulnerable than usual, eir bare arms covered in dark bruises and eir feet coated in human blood, and Tish wasn't sure she wanted context for the latter.

Lucy directed em to sit, and she ran a damp cloth over eir skin—not quite a bath, but it would do—before asking softly if she could help em out of the chemise. Ey nodded, and she carefully pulled the thin fabric away from Theta's torso; a wound had reopened and the clotting blood had stuck the chemise to eir skin.

Tish didn't think much of it other than to ache at the thought of Theta being hurt; Lucy, who could see the wound properly, blanched and gave a tiny " _Oh…_ " She held Theta's arm away from eir side to dab at the blood, and when it was cleaned up as well as it could have been—the cuts themselves still dark and bloody but the skin around them pale orange—Tish rather suddenly understood, and felt ill.

Someone had carved crudely-formed letters into eir skin: WHORE. She hoped they were dead. Judging by the blood Theta'd been covered in, they probably were.

"Tish," said Lucy, and her voice was softer than Tish had ever imagined it could be. "Chemise, please."

"Right, right." She tried not to be hurt by the way Theta pressed into Lucy for protection as she handed it over. It didn't really work.

But it got easier. Not right away, not quickly by any means. Some days were worse than others, sometimes Tish would do something without thinking or Lucy—just Lucy, now, and it was almost impossible to reconcile the sweet, warm young woman with Mrs. Saxon—would overestimate her ability to make Theta feel safe. Most of the time it was Theta emself who pushed eir limits too far, trying to make Tish feel better.

But slowly, it got easier. Theta seemed almost hardwired to view all humans but Lucy as a threat; apparently the Master had been using some sort of weird alien mind-meld to make em afraid of Tish's species. Once they had managed to convince em on that instinctive level that Tish would never hurt em, they managed much better. Theta still jumped at sudden movements, but didn't cringe away from Tish when she moved towards em, and one day ey reached out and placed a nervous hand on her arm in thanks for handing em one of the dozen components of eir robes, and she knew the worst was over.

* * *

Lucy sighed deeply.

"Are you _sure_ ey won't even consider it?"

Tish very nearly laughed. "Hasn't let me give em anything but that godawful orange since we met."

Lucy Saxon had been something of a fashion icon before her insane husband had taken over the world and killed millions of people. Sometimes those tendencies flared up again; she was looking at Theta's wardrobe as if in physical pain. "But the blue would look so lovely with eir eyes, or even the _gold…_ "

"Don't even bother," Tish told her. "It's like breaking horses."

Somewhere in her mind she wondered how the hell they'd gotten here. It had taken just over a month for Theta to become just as clingy and dependent on Tish as ey'd ever been on Lucy, and it was hard not to respond to that kind of childlike need; sometimes it felt like she and Lucy had adopted em. She tried to ignore that thought, as there were some things too weird to be vocalised.

A lot of things about Lucy were like that. Tish didn't really know what to _do_ with her. Initially she'd assumed that she was there because the Master wanted to keep an eye on Theta all the time now, as punishment for the ibuprofen, and she'd resented the blonde's presence almost as much as she resented Theta for falling for it. Lucy was standoffish, never really looked Tish in the eye, talked a lot about nothing but in a superior tone of voice that she didn't even seem to realise she was using. It was abundantly clear that Lucy Saxon had no idea how to have friends.

But it was hard not to bond, just a little, over a mutual and unexplainable need to keep Theta safe. Outside their little sanctuary they didn't dare even look at each other; even tucked away in relative safety they rarely made eye contact and kept very carefully to the subjects of weather, whichever events were current public knowledge, Theta, and eir lamentable fashion tastes. Still, Lucy had been making shaky overtures into a genuine friendship—Tish was no longer the only one keeping Theta fed, but some of the gestures went beyond that. Tish had noticed that she almost never got scheduled to clean the master bedroom anymore ( _Master_ bedroom? She could never tell if it was a pun or not), and the bruises on Lucy's arms and the quiet restraint in her bearing spoke volumes of exactly how grateful Tish was to be mostly out of his reach. Or at least, as much as was possible on a sealed airship.

She couldn't prove that Lucy was behind her schedule changes, of course. But she was _definitely_ the one who'd initiated one of the most awkward conversations in Tish's entire life; no matter what the mitigating circumstances there was no possible way for a conversation that began with the words "So I've noticed you get really bad cramps…" to turn out even slightly normal. It had been worth it, though; as it turned out, Lucy's birth control _did_ work perfectly well for Tish, though it had taken three days and Theta making snarky comments that almost sounded like ey was back to eir old self before they could look each other in the eye again.

There was one gift Lucy had given her that seemed different, somehow. It was an absolutely gorgeous silver ring, intricate and light, beautiful in its simplicity; the exact opposite of something she'd have expected Lucy Saxon to own, let alone treasure.

"It was my mother's," she'd said quietly, looking terrified that they would somehow be overheard. "Harry never knew I had it, the Master won't know it's missing." Sometimes she talked like that, when they were alone without Theta; before the coup he was Harry, afterwards he was the Master. Tish called him Saxon exactly as she always had, once she was convinced Lucy wasn't there to spy on her. "I just don't want anything to happen to it. Please take it."

She had, because it was the kind of request you didn't say _no_ to and because she was starting to _like_ Lucy, thought they could even have been friends if they'd met when she was just Lucy and Tish was just Tish; of course, they never could have. That was the great irony, wasn't it? The three of them, they could have been friends if they'd met differently but the only way they could ever have met as themselves was like _this_ , where they were all so broken they didn't even know who they were anymore.

But, she thought, lying in the dark and turning Lucy's ring over in her fingers, listening to the Valiant hum and waiting for another miserable day… maybe they really could make something. It would never be normal, it would never be safe, maybe it would never even be _healthy_. But, just possibly, it could be theirs.


	10. Chapter 10

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: abuse, molestation, references to rape.

"Morning, Theta," Tish said cheerfully.

Theta made a little whimpering sound in reply, tucking emself in a corner. Eir frills flared slowly in and out, shivering in a now-familiar pattern that Theta had assured her was a Gallifreyan form of meditation. Being escorted to and from eir dressing room by guards every morning was beginning to take its toll on Theta; by trial and error, the three of them had determined that the best thing Tish and Lucy could do was to act normally until ey was able to calm down. It went against all of her instincts not to hover, but that only ever made things worse.

"Lucy coming today?" asked Tish. Sometimes she couldn't, and those days always felt a little less whole, even more _wrong_ than usual.

"Sorry, she was running late." Lucy breezed past the guards and brought the doors closed behind her with all the casual grace of a queen, and Tish tried not to grin too widely. Six weeks ago it would have set her teeth on edge. But she was getting to understand Lucy's ways; she dealt with a loss of control by acting like she still had it to the point of borderline delusion, where Tish had been raised to deal with the same situations by fighting tooth and nail to regain control in actuality. She was beginning to wonder if maybe not all of Lucy's airs were an act; sometimes she could manage to get on top of a situation simply by acting like she already was. Tish would have to learn that trick.

Besides, sometimes it was nice to see her kind of disdain aimed at the guards. It helped to make them seem like less of an unstoppable force, and more like regular men with stupid helmets and semiautomatic phallic symbols.

"Morning, Lucy."

Lucy smiled at her. She never bothered with things like greetings, not in here. Tish had been offended until she realised that Lucy associated that kind of thing with the kind of false politeness she'd been raised with, and dispensing with them was her way of letting her guard down. Her smiles were sharper now, too, than they had been; less of the pretty upturned lips and glassy looks, with more teeth and eyes that actually _looked_ at you.

She had very straight, very white teeth. Only to be expected with her high-class status and fancy girls' school education, but it still threw Tish off sometimes; she _worked_ for people like that, she never spent her free time with them, they weren't her friends…

Lucy wasn't precisely her friend, but she might have been the closest thing. Closer than Theta, even, who was too alien most of the time to bond with. Eir knowledge of human culture consisted mostly of literature and history, and some of _that_ Tish was quite sure hadn't actually happened. Ey'd asked her the other day if she read the Karkus comic strips in the Hourly Telepress and been taken off-guard when she hadn't had any idea what that was.

"Theta," Lucy said. "If you're ready, you should take a shower. And remember it's laundry day, so bring out any towels you have in there so we can get them washed."

"So Tish can wash them, you mean," said Tish.

Lucy winced, looking much more upset than Tish had intended. She'd meant it as a friendly rib, a teasing play on words—she still used the same phrase with Theta half the time, they'd even used it at home before everything went bad. She hadn't meant to make Lucy feel guilty; it wasn't her fault. Honestly, Tish wouldn't trade places for anything. Dirty laundry and endless amounts of silver polish were much better company than the Master.

While Theta took eir shower, Lucy set about straightening up the room. There was really nothing to be straightened, so this mostly took the form of opening drawers or wardrobes, patting the contents absently, and closing them again. It was a sort of peaceful routine. Safe and nice.

"You know what I miss?" Tish said suddenly.

Lucy hummed. "What?"

"I miss books."

Lucy paused, and gave a wistful sigh. "You're not alone there," she said with a little smile. "I have a few I brought with me from home. Most of my favourites are gone, though. I'd let you borrow the ones I have," she added quickly. "Except I think he'd notice."

Tish thought longingly that it would almost be worth the risk. "I remember Martha always loved Harry Potter," she said with a chuckle. "Went to midnight releases and everything… guess we'll never know how that one ends, will we?"

Lucy looked hesitant. "...Theta's read it," she said. "You could ask em."

Something about that idea seemed terribly sad. "Nah," Tish said with feigned casualness. "I was never really into the wizard stuff. I remember I used to love Nancy Drew, though. I had a whole shelf full of those books."

Lucy lit up. "You did too! They were my guilty pleasure, the early ones especially." At Tish's confused look, she explained, "My parents didn't approve of fantasy. They thought mysteries would just distress me. I had to get all kinds of reviews praising them before my father let me buy them."

Tish wondered, not for the first time, if she'd been the only one of their odd threesome not to have grown up in an abusive home. Lucy's family seemed to have some frankly disturbing ideas of how to raise a child, in any case, and Theta was reticent to say anything about eir life prior to leaving Gallifrey but there were some things it was hard not to pick up on. She had eyes and ears, and Saxon was nothing if not talkative.

Theta came out of the bathroom carrying a small pile of neatly-folded towels.

"Oh, Theta!" said Tish. "We were just talking about books. What did you read, growing up?"

"Er," said Theta, putting the towels down on a shelf. "The Book of the Old Time? The Triumphs of Rassilon? The Myth of Zagreus?"

Tish remembered belatedly that Theta was an alien, and felt a bit silly. "Those all sound a bit stuffy," she said.

"Some of the more obscure ones are actually a decent source of information, once you learn to read past the propaganda. The Bones of the Dead even mentions Lazuline and Eutenoyar." Judging by eir tone, that was a rare thing.

"I have no idea who those are," said Lucy. Tish was still stuck on what was apparently a history book being called "The Bones of the Dead".

"Well, you know their names, and that's more than half of Prydon can say."

"Arms up," Tish interrupted, and Theta obediently let her pull an under-robe over eir head. "So, orange, orange, or orange?"

"None of these are really _orange,"_ Lucy informed her. "This one's more of a burnt sienna…"

"Theta?"

Ey smiled. "Well, maybe a break from orange wouldn't be that bad…"

" _It's still orange!"_ Tish exclaimed. "It's a slightly different shade of _orange!"_

"Burnt. Sienna." Lucy looked ready to defend the colour to the death.

"It _is_ a bit Arcalian," Theta added. "When I was at the Academy there was a bit of a disagreement over whether one shade was a warm brown or a dark orange and the Patrexes ended up outlawing the dye entirely."

Tish didn't know what that meant, so she tossed the _burnt sienna_ robe unceremoniously over eir head. "Towels," she ordered, and Theta struggled to keep eir carefully-folded stack of towels from falling apart while simultaneously wiggling into a robe. It ended up getting stuck in eir frills, and Theta grumbled and stuck eir tongue out at Tish when she laughed and fixed it for em.

"Lucy," she laughed, "Get the towels, I think this thing's on backwards…"

Lucy sighed, smiling fondly at them. "Oh, _Theta._ " She dodged eir flailing arm to rescue the stack of towels, retreating to a safe distance and hiding a giggle behind her hand. "Theta, how did you manage _that?_ "

"I'm not the one who did it!" Theta argued. "Ask Tish how _she_ managed it!"

Lucy laughed delightedly as Theta and Tish struggled with eir robes, perching on a low table with her ankles crossed delicately. Tish was quite certain that if she'd had a box of popcorn she would have been eating it.

Theta let out a high-pitched shriek as ey tripped on the hem. Tish had enough time for an understated "Oh no—" before Theta toppled over, both of them hopelessly tangled in a ridiculous robe so that Tish was squashed under em.

Lucy almost fell off the table laughing. Tish wormed one arm free of the robe and made a very rude gesture in what she hoped was her general direction. "Theta," she groaned, " _exoskeleton_. I have soft bits."

"It's not Theta's fault you've got em all tangled up," Lucy chided, but she managed to stop cackling long enough to pick her way over to Tish's side and offer her a hand. Tish took it gratefully, pulled herself halfway onto her feet, got something tangled in a sleeve, and fell backwards again, this time on _top_ of Theta and with Lucy somehow getting dragged along and pinned under her.

"I give up," she groaned. Lucy, flushed and giggling, buried her head in Tish's shoulder as Theta grumbled and thrashed around.

Ey froze as the guards outside knocked harshly on the door. "You lot hurry up in there," one of them called, voice muffled slightly by the thick door. "The Master wants you in five minutes whether the alien's ready or not."

Lucy pulled herself up, quickly helping to untangle Theta and Tish. Working together, they managed to get Theta's robes on in the right direction; Theta emself was very little help, frozen in terror at the sound of the guard's voice and the implied threat. Lucy's whispered assurances that they weren't going to come in and she and Tish wouldn't let them touch em seemed like the only things keeping em from breaking down completely.

One of the guards opened the door just as they were making the finishing touches on eir robes, and Theta clung to Tish as they were hurried down the halls; she'd been dragged along as well, as apparently the Master's orders were to bring everyone who was in Theta's dressing room. She hated being brought to the throne room, although it luckily wasn't a common thing. The last time she'd been summoned there was to mop up Theta's blood.

"Letitia Jones!" the Master called grandly as soon as they entered the room. "And my _dear_ Theta. I trust you've been taking good care of them." She tried not to shudder; a great deal of her time was spent consciously avoiding being noticed by the Master, and the fact that he seemed to have been waiting for _her,_ specifically, was a very bad sign. Lucy reached out and clutched her arm for a moment without even seeming to realise it.

"Oh!" said the Master, seeming honestly surprised. "So that's where you've been off to in the mornings, is it, Lucy? Are you making friends?" He raised an eyebrow; he didn't seem angry, but his gaze jumping between the two of them made her feel ill, and she became suddenly aware of how close they stood, less than a metre apart and Theta shivering between them.

Ey was steadier now that they were in the throne room, the Master's presence having some effect on em she didn't understand. Or, well. She understood enough of it, from Lucy's vague, confused explanations and Theta's rare off-hand remarks. Ey usually wouldn't speak again for the day after saying something about the Master.

Lucy gave the kind of delicately pretty dead-eyed smile that Tish had gotten so used to in her time as Harold Saxon's wife. "You wanted to see me, Master?"

"No, of course not," he answered, skipping down the steps. The guards backed off to flank the door as he approached, and Tish could feel Theta relax as Lucy tensed. "I wanted Theta. Though since you're here…" He grabbed her suddenly, tugging her into him for a rough, deep kiss. "…You might as well stay."

Lucy gave a nervous, birdlike nod, but he wasn't even looking at her anymore. The icy shell and distant, broken look were back; there was none of her quickness and warmth now. She tried to catch Lucy's eye, to make sure she was all right. The woman wouldn't even look at her, and the intensity of her sudden hatred for the Master took Tish by surprise.

"Theta, Theta, Theta…" the Master sighed, looking em up and down. "What were you _doing_ this morning? You're wrinkled," he said distastefully. "You know, I expect better of you. You reflect on me, after all, you can hardly go around looking so utterly _Cadonin_."

Theta looked at the floor. "I'm sorry, Master," ey murmured. "It won't happen again."

"It'd best not!" said the Master, grinning as if the whole thing had been forgotten; Tish knew better than to believe it. "Now, come here, my dear," he beckoned.

Theta didn't so much as hesitate, letting go of her to rush to the Master's side, looking up at him with gratitude as the Master put an arm around eir waist and ran his hand through eir frills. He led Theta up the steps of the dais and kissed eir temple as ey slipped to the floor beside the throne. Lucy followed silently in their wake, tucking herself into place behind the Master, and Tish wondered awkwardly what exactly she was supposed to do.

"Whenever you're ready, Miss Jones." The Master waved her up lazily, one hand still running through Theta's frills.

All right, then, apparently she was meant to be on the balcony. There was no possible way this was going to end well.

"I have a surprise for you, Theta," the Master cooed as Tish picked her way up the stairs, backing into a corner out of his immediate line of sight. "Is it ready?" he called to a guard in a tone that said clearly the answer had best be _yes._ At the guard's affirmative, he sat back, looking satisfied. "You've been so good recently, Theta," he praised. "I thought you deserved a treat. Oh," he added as an afterthought, turning back to the guard. "Before we get down to business, that revolt at the Finnish facility. They've tracked the instigators?"

"Yes, sir."

"Have them executed."

The guard saluted again. "Right away, sir."

Theta curled close to emself, looking miserable, but didn't say anything, and calmed somewhat as the Master continued petting eir frills.

"Excellent," he murmured, and Tish didn't think he was talking to the guard anymore. "Well, now that's out of the way. I believe there's a gift waiting for Theta."

A guard pulled someone forward from the back of the large room. Tish gasped.

Martha was worn ragged, and she should have _expected_ that, had done in the back of her mind, but she'd not been prepared for it. She looked like she hadn't slept in days, heavy bags under her eyes. Her exhaustion in no way lessened her emotional spectrum, though, judging by the way she glared at the Master like she might be able to strike him down with her gaze alone.

Tish hadn't heard anything about her sister having been captured. She hadn't really heard anything about Martha at all now for weeks, but that was hardly strange; Theta rarely had information about her, or at least any that ey thought was safe to share, and ey'd said only a few days ago ey hadn't heard anything about her from the Master.

Martha caught her eye, tilting her head in a question: _are you alright?_

Tish honestly didn't know the answer to that. She nodded minutely.

Martha's eyes cut to Theta, and she looked back to Tish, face lined with concern.

Tish shrugged.

"…Martha?" Theta whispered slowly.

Martha lifted her head boldly. "Doctor." She didn't sound happy to see em.

Theta flinched at the name, or the tone, or both. Ey understood human emotion at such unpredictable degrees it was difficult to tell. Tish had a theory it was to do with how well ey could pick up empathic projections (a phrase she'd never have used a year ago, but which had become commonplace dealing with Theta) from the speaker, because it was so ridiculously varied. Sometimes it was like ey knew exactly what she was thinking, and other times ey didn't seem to know what a smile meant.

"…Well _that_ was a heartwarming reunion." The Master sounded both exasperated and satisfied, if that were even possible. "And here I was thinking you'd be glad to know your friend was right here, all safe and sound. And really, Martha Jones, you've been very ungrateful. Two meals a day and a roof over your head? That's more than you got where _Theta_ sent you. If you'd just behave yourself you could even join your family again. I might even let Theta see you once in a while, if you earned it. Doesn't that sound like a nicer plan than keeping such a pretty face locked away in a dungeon, Theta?"

Theta looked stricken, almost ill. "Don't hurt her, Master," ey whimpered, clinging to his leg so hard eir knuckles would have been white if it weren't for the exoskeleton. "Please don't, _please_. You can hurt me instead if you want to—"

"Theta!" the Master exclaimed, sounding deeply wounded. "Why in the world would I want to hurt her? I want to _help_ her. She's been very stubborn about telling me where her little Resistance pockets are. Very brave. I thought about throwing her out an airlock," he said casually, "but I know how much she means to you, and you _know_ I hate to hurt you unless you make me. So I'm willing to forget that whole thing in exchange for her obedience. Do tell her to make the right choice, Theta."

Theta seemed frozen.

"Theta," the Master prompted. Eir frills had started fanning and folding again, rapidly this time; if the slow pulsing was a Gallifreyan meditation technique, Tish could only assume this was their equivalent to hyperventilating. The Master sighed. "I thought this might happen. Tish, darling," he said in what could almost be called a drawl. "Talk to your sister."

There were so many things she needed to say. She'd been living in terror of losing her sister for the better part of a year, she'd missed her so much, she was so incredibly _proud_ of her, but how did you _say_ something like that…?

Tish swallowed.

"…Hey, Martha."

"Hey Tish. How's mum and dad?"

"Alive."

Marth gave a wry smile. "Well, that's something. See them often?"

"Every night," said Tish weakly.

"Tell them hi from me, will you?"

The Master cleared his throat. "Letitia…"

Tish squared her shoulders. "You can do it if you like," she said, because if there was one truth of Martha's existence it was that. "But you don't have to."

The Master sighed deeply. "Tish," he said. "Oh, Tish. You don't have to lie to her. Go on, tell her she could enjoy it here. I know _you_ have."

"You could enjoy it if you were a white guy," Tish said flippantly. "Although the company leaves something to be desired."

She expected the Master to be angry, or else do that thing he did where he pretended you'd hurt his feelings. What she wasn't expecting was the darkly amused chuckle that sent chills up her spine. "Really?" he said. "Well, I have to say, you've caught me by surprise there. I didn't know you swung that way."

"What?" she said, a sick feeling in her stomach.

"Not that I disagree with you," he added conversationally. "There's quite a lot to desire."

Oh, no. No. No. God, no.

"Lucy?" said the Master. "Be a dear and come over here, won't you?" Tish stared at him openly, half relieved he hadn't been referring to himself, half shocked he'd do what it looked like he was going to. Or maybe not shocked, she corrected, thinking back to the first time she saw Theta after ey'd been killed. Less shocking, then, than horrifying.

She didn't even _know_ for sure if she liked Lucy like that, never mind the other way around, and even in a completely different situation, even if they were _together_ this would still be…

Lucy stepped forward uncertainly. "Master?" she said, her face blank.

"You two have gotten rather close, haven't you?"

"Well…" Lucy started, and she didn't seem to know where she'd been going with the sentence. Tish couldn't blame her, her mouth was dry and her heart was racing.

"How would you describe yourselves?" asked the Master, inspecting his fingernails. "Acquaintances? Friends? _Lovers_?" he added curiously. "No, couldn't be that, Lucy never smells of human sex." He said it with a sneer, like it was somehow lesser than him, and if Tish could have formed words she'd have screamed at him for that; she _knew_ what he'd done to Lucy.

"Tish, what…?" Martha's eyes were as sharp as ever, flicking between the two of them, and Tish wished she couldn't see the betrayal starting to form in them.

"It's not like that," she said desperately, and she wasn't even sure what _that_ was, because she _had_ been noticing things about Lucy that went beyond simple observation but it wasn't… "She's not who you think she is, Martha, she's changed…!"

The Master laughed. "You seem to have gotten Lucy and Theta confused, Letitia."

She rolled her eyes. "Lucy's not evil," she continued. "Neither is Theta, for that matter. Weird, yeah, but not _evil_. She tries to help, when she can."

"I'm moved," said the Master. "Deeply moved. Your sister really seems to care about her, doesn't she?" he called down to Martha.

She could see the anger in every inch of Martha's bearing, but she replied evenly, "Reckon that's her business."

"Now that's cold," the Master rebuked. "You ought to be happy that your sister's fitting in so well here." He looked at Tish and Lucy, standing awkwardly on opposite ends of the dais. "I think a practical demonstration is in order. Tish," he said, " _Do_ show your sister how much you enjoy your place here. Unless you've given up on her, of course." He examined his nails again. "I could always throw her back in the cells, but truth be told I'm getting a bit bored with her. If she's not going to make herself useful I really don't see any reason to keep her around." He smiled pleasantly. "I would try my best to convince her."


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: abuse, torture, mindrape, xenophobia, misgendering, references to rape, body horror.

Ey hadn't meant to say it.

Ey'd meant to say a lot of things, but definitely not that, ey knew better than to say that, but it was _Lucy and Tish_ and Martha was struggling in the grip of a guard and Lucy made a sound like the beginning of a sob and ey _couldn't_ let it go on, ey'd do _anything_ , Master, just _stop this_ , please, _Kosch—_

The Master hadn't noticed for a nanospan but when his brain caught up with his ears he dug his fingers hard into the neural ganglion in eir shoulder and hissed " _What did you call me?_ " and Theta must have shrieked in pain because everyone stopped and turned and looked.

Ey knew ey should have looked down in submission but ey were too afraid to tear eir eyes away from the Master's. "K-koschei," ey whispered hoarsely, and couldn't even hear eir own voice.

The Master twitched and Theta tried to back away from him but his fingers were still digging into eir shoulder and there was nowhere for em to go and ey felt ill and ey couldn't breathe.

When the Master spoke again, his voice was terse and furious and very, very tightly controlled.

"Take them back to the cells," he hissed between his teeth. The guards dragged Martha away, and Theta was scared for her, ey _was_ but ey couldn't even focus on what she was shouting because ey was so much more scared for emself.

Ey could actually see the exact moment the Master's last thread of patience snapped.

" _All of them!"_ he shouted, and Theta wished ey had eir shimmer so ey could cry.

"No," ey sobbed, "Please, it's not their fault, don't _hurt_ them—"

The Master hit em hard enough to send em reeling back on the floor, stunned by the force of the anger pressed into eir mind with the open-handed slap.

"Get the _lovebirds_ out of my sight," he snapped. The guards converged on Tish and Lucy—Tish was crying silently, stumbling to her feet, where Lucy's face was like ice—and Theta almost went into hysterics, fighting back a scream. The Master gripped eir frills and dragged em onto eir knees. "Theta and I are going on a little nostalgia tour."

The Master pulled em, stumbling, down the halls of the Valiant and into the bowels of the airship and ey was terrified, _no, not again, please_ , but the Master bypassed that section of the ship entirely. Instead he dragged Theta deeper than ey'd ever been, and there was an awful humming sound, ill and grating, and ey clapped eir hands to eir head to drown out the noise before realising it wasn't a sound at all. It only got louder and louder and it hurt so much, ey didn't understand how the Master wasn't affected; even unbonded to her he must have heard it, she was being _tortured_ , crying out for help to anyone who could listen.

By the time ey'd been pulled into the Paradox Machine proper ey didn't know if it was only the TARDIS screaming or if ey was as well. The console of the machine glowed an ugly, vicious crimson, the colour of the Rassilon-led ranks of War Loomed soldiers' armour. The metal grate under eir bare feet burnt red-hot and the Master was speaking, jerking harshly at eir frills as punctuation; ey couldn't make out the words over the TARDIS' screams.

But ey could feel it when the Master ripped open his TARDIS' telepathic circuits, his hand in eir frills holding eir own mind captive, forcing a twisted mockery of a union. Ey could feel her shriek of defiance, feel her brace herself against the Master, and ey could feel her rage and fear when she wasn't able to stop him, as he took her incredible power and forced it through the wrong pathways. They burned through Theta's mind, black and scarlet in eir head as they fought with each other, searing and scorching, the Master snapping connections and ripping the TARDIS' power from her to cauterise them before they could heal, and it shouldn't have happened it was so _wrong_ she wasn't supposed to be _used_ this way and ey missed her warm golden spark, she didn't _want_ to hurt em...

And then she was gone, the connection hauled closed by the Master, locking her out again while she screamed, and this time she was really and truly gone because when the connection closed Theta could no longer feel her.

Ey… couldn't feel her. The Master's fingers were still wound through eir frills but Theta couldn't feel him, either, not even a little, not even a _hint_ , and ey wanted to scream as ey realised eir telepathy was _gone._ The ability was still there, ey could _sense_ it, Gallifreyans were a telepathic species by their nature, but no matter how hard Theta strained ey couldn't access it, couldn't access _anything._ With the TARDIS bond had died eir timesense, empathic projection, communicative telepathy, _timesense_ , it was like being smothered from all sides. Ey couldn't _feel anything_ and ey never thought ey'd ever have to go through this again, not after the Divergent universe, and that seemed like a loomling's game in comparison, ey might not have had eir timesense (nor eir physical senses, for a stretch, but that was barely noticable; ey'd hardly relied on them to begin with), but that was nothing compared to a block on eir chronal lobe entirely; if Bortresoye had been like being blinded, this was having gone blind and deaf and mute.

Without the TARDIS screaming in eir mind (and instead surrounded by utter, terrifying silence, ey was _in eir TARDIS,_ it should not have been _silent,_ ey couldn't hear her or feel her and ey didn't know what to _do)_ Theta could finally hear the Master.

"...and until you _forget Gallifrey ever existed,_ " he was growling, "You can _stay this way."_

It shouldn't have been such a terrifying prospect. Humans lived like this, most species in the universe did, and they all managed perfectly fine with four to six senses; ey still had considerably more than that functioning at full capacity, and they were almost all of them stronger than those of humans. Ey should have been fine, ey'd get used to it, it wouldn't be so horrible…

Ey let eir hands fall limply to eir sides and ey opened eir eyes again. The burning metal grate beneath eir feet ought to have been all the more noticeable with the absense of so much other sensory information, but ey felt numb. When ey looked up at the Master, he didn't look like _the Master_ , could have been any five-dimensional humanoid and could have passed for four at a glance, his perception filter higher quality than anything Theta'd ever had. Without being able to sense his mind…

But it was difficult to mistake that look of cold derision. He dropped Theta carelessly at his feet now that he was done with em, turned to a guard and said...

No. Oh, no.

 _The translation circuits._ A telepathic process that could at least partly function without a bond to a TARDIS and was an innate part of a Gallifreyan's mind: the ability to understand speech and writing under most circumstances. Ey couldn't think of a time ey'd not been able to understand what someone was saying. And the Master's words were gibberish.

Which meant… "You… speak English?"

" _Shut up!"_ the Master yelled, and that time Theta understood him just fine. Ey flinched out of the way of the kick the Master aimed at em. "Just get rid of them," he snapped at the guard, and this time he was very careful to let his own translation matrix take over.

The guard said something shortly and grabbed Theta's shoulder, pulling em roughly to eir feet.

"Master!" ey cried. "What did you tell him to do? _Master_!"

He didn't respond to Theta, turning to the guard and speaking again in English. What he might have said, Theta had no idea. It seemed like he wasn't saying enough to have been giving anything like detailed instructions, but ey had never studied English and didn't know how sentences were constructed, how much information could be communicated in a given period.

The guard nodded, repeating his two-syllable refrain—it must have been "yes, Master", ey thought—and dragging em out of the cannibalised TARDIS. Ey tripped and almost fell, stepping on the guard's feet and receiving a harsh reprimand that sounded like an angry sneeze.

Theta was steered back to the stairwell and up, head reeling and stuffy and stifled and it was like trying to interact with a world covered in cotton balls, it felt wrong and ey couldn't tell what anything was supposed to _be._ The guard paused for a second on one of the landings and Theta's hearts almost stopped, ey experienced several moments of white-blind panic because no matter how shell-shocked and disoriented ey was ey would _never_ forget this part of the ship and _what had the Master told him to do?_ But the guard only adjusted his grip on Theta, holding em by the upper arm instead of the shoulder and supporting some of eir weight to guide em up the last flight of stairs and back into the main deck of the Valiant.

Once they were back in the throne room the guard let go of em, leaving Theta to straighten eir sleeves out from where they'd gotten bunched up from being grabbed. The guard waited silently until ey'd finished, then placed a hand between Theta's shoulder blades—and ey cringed at that, didn't want the guard to touch em why was he _touching_ em what did he _want—_ and steered em firmly up the steps and onto the balcony. He said something to em, a short set of instructions that Theta wished ey could understand and hoped ey wouldn't get in trouble for _not_ understanding; the guard luckily didn't seem affected by Theta's blank look, nodded professionally and stepping back into a corner. Theta got the feeling ey was supposed to take eir usual place, but the guard was _behind em_ if ey did that.

Eir frills fanned in and out quickly, and ey tried eir best to calm down; the Master would be back in a few microspans at most and the guard seemed uninterested besides. Hands shaking, ey slid to the floor beside the throne, tucking the fabric of eir robes behind eir knees. Ey looked behind em at the guard for a moment, afraid to look away from him but equally afraid he would take Theta's staring as a sign of disrespect. He might not be doing anything now, but ey had no way of knowing if he didn't have orders for later in the day.

The Master did return eventually—it mustn't have been more than a microspan, but with the guard standing behind em it felt like an eternity—and the day continued almost as normal. The Master didn't touch Theta once and consistently spoke in English when guards, servants, and other assorted employees entered to have audience with him. Theta sat meekly beside him, such a normal fixture of the room hardly anyone seemed to notice em.

Their language was quick and rough, with long vowels and harsh consonants and no particular cadence, and they used "suh", whatever that meant, with the same frequency that Daleks used "exterminate".

The daily routine could only last so long, however, and once the Master got bored of running the planet and left the throne room without so much as pausing to ruffle Theta's frills, and the guard _didn't follow him,_ Theta was rather at eir wit's end as to what ey was supposed to _do._ Normally ey would retreat to eir dressing room, even though Tish wouldn't be there, because it was safe and familiar and well-lit and ey knew ey was allowed; or else ey would see if Lucy was in her room, and they'd sit quietly together or sometimes Theta would take a nap. Ey had been allowed to sleep at the foot of the bed after eir regeneration, with a much longer chain. Theta wondered if that would be taken away now.

Theta decided to go to eir dressing room after all. If nothing else it would be warm and familiar and maybe it would make the awful silence seem a little less awful. Ey gathered eir robes to stand, and the guard straightened, focusing sharply on em, and looked like he was about to move.

Theta quickly sat down again, and the guard rolled his eyes but went back to standing still in the corner.

When the Master came looking for Theta, spans later, ey was still curled into emself, pressed against the throne and watching the guard from the corner of eir lateral eyes.

The Master didn't comment on it. He ordered dinner up from the kitchens but it was one of their informal nights; the one thing he said to Theta in Gallifreyan was "I don't have time for you," and Theta tried really very hard not to think about what he did have time for. So Theta sat in a corner of the throne room with a bowl of soup ey had no appetite for while the Master ate his own meal without looking at em and swanned off to do something or other.

The guard never stopped shadowing em. He never touched Theta or acted like he was going to, he was just… _there_ , standing unobtrusively to the side while ey ate eir soup. Theta wanted to ask the Master about him again, but the Master had been very clear that he didn't want questions, and Theta didn't want to be hurt anymore. When the Master left that night, he gave the guard an order—in English, and where had he even _learnt_ English, even _Theta_ didn't speak English! The guard had saluted and given that short hissing bark of assent.

He didn't move until Theta finished eir soup and placed the bowl gingerly on the kitchen cart, at which point he stepped forward and gestured with his weapon in the direction of the Master's private rooms. Theta shook as ey was lead down the hall and into the bedroom; the guard hadn't done anything yet, but that didn't necessarily mean he wouldn't.

The room was empty except for them. The Master wouldn't be in for a while, he always went somewhere in the evenings, and Theta stared down at the carpeting and hoped very intently the Master cared more about not getting bloodstains on it than he did Theta being punished for eir recalcitrance.

The guard holstered his gun and stepped towards Theta and ey panicked, tripping backwards as the guard reached for em, and _oh no, please no,_ and ey didn't have a way to lash out against him, not how ey'd fallen, and he was pulling at eir robes and Theta thrashed helplessly, crying out for him to stop and wincing a moment later in expectance of a blow which didn't come. The manacle at the end of the bedpost was tightened on eir wrist and ey dug eir fingers into the hard metal floor.

"You're begging like you think you have the _right_ ," the guard said in disgust, ramming his hips forward. "Let me lay it out for you since you're obviously too _stupid_ to understand it on your own: you don't _have_ any rights. You're someone's _property_ , just some little alien fucktoy that can't even do its own job right."

A second voice behind em: "If its begging annoys you so much I could always cut out its vocal chords. Then it wouldn't be able to."

Theta flinched at the warm, cloying breath on eir frills, whimpering in fear as the blade dug into eir neck.

"Nah," the original guard said, shoving two fingers into em and _no no no please no it was bad enough already_ , "I'd rather hear the whore scream."

Theta _did_ scream, ey was screaming _now_ , curled in a ball on the carpet, pressing into the cold end of the bed in an attempt to fuse with the metal and the guard was saying something, shouting and holding up his hands like he was trying to calm a wild animal. But he was just a guard, just a human, hardness but not malice in his eyes, and he looked more alarmed than anything else; he'd even tossed eir outer robe back over em, hadn't touched em at all except to fasten the handcuffs.

He said something to Theta—a question, it sounded like, more wary than concerned but not aggressive and not a threat, either. Theta couldn't have answered it even if ey had understood it; the best ey could manage was a whimper, curling into a slightly tighter ball. The guard at least seemed less panicked now that the worst was over, and cast one last disturbed look at Theta before letting himself out of the room. Theta was positive he would be back in the morning but pathetically grateful he wasn't _there_. Ey turned onto eir back, hugging emself and staring at the ceiling as ey waited for the Master to come.

* * *

It was really, really cold down here.

It made sense, of course, bowels of the ship and all; there were no personnel down here, just engine rooms somewhere below them and this awkward level in between that had probably originally been meant for storage, but then again the Valiant had been Harold Saxon's baby and Tish was fairly certain there was a reason the _storage rooms_ had been designed to have barred windows and ridiculously secure iron doors. The one thing nobody had bothered designing was particularly good insulation. Tish suspected they were right up against the outer hull, and prayed the walls didn't open or something like that.

She'd stopped trying the doors ages ago, of course. They didn't budge and she wasn't stupid enough to just bash herself against solid iron in the hope that the muscle and weight of a political PA would somehow tear a hole in it. Now she was hugging her knees on the ground in the cold, shivering and stubbornly refusing to sit on the thin bunk, which was probably even less comfortable than the floor.

She wished she could be angry at the Master. That would be so much easier than scared and cold and lonely.

Anger would be so much easier than the guilt.

She hugged herself closer and wondered if she'd ever forgive herself. She could still smell Lucy, even over the scent of metal and fear. She could… she could still _taste_ her, even though that was impossible, whatever Theta had shouted it had stopped… well, everything, it'd stopped _her_ , before anything had even really had a chance to happen and she was grateful to em, she _was_ but she'd been ready to do it and Lucy was never going to look at her again even if the Master _didn't_ kill her, which was likely, as she was no longer needed as a bargaining chip against her sister. Oh, God, Martha would never forgive her, not even she was that generous.

She couldn't stand it. She shoved herself to her feet and kicked the door. It didn't even bang properly, it was too solid and heavy. All she did was (from the feel of it) break every bone in her foot, hop on the other until she almost fell over, and swear in a manner that would have scandalised her father.

To her shock, there was a soft sigh from somewhere she couldn't see, off to her left. It worried her that she could recognise the woman just from hearing her exhale.

For a long time, she didn't say anything. She just leaned against the tiny little barred square and tried not to cry.

"...Lucy?" she managed.

There was no answer.

"Lucy, I'm sorry."

"Don't _._ " It was a whisper.

"I'm _sorry,_ " she tried again. "Lucy, I—"

"Don't!" And now Tish was truly shocked, because she'd never heard that kind of raw emotion in Lucy Saxon's voice, not ever. "Don't apologise like it was your fault. You both _do_ that, he forces you into his game and you act like you had a choice, it's going to kill me, now _stop it._ "

"I did have a choice," Tish reminded her. Her voice was rough from trying to fight back self-loathing tears. "I could have said no."

"You could have told him to murder your sister or you could have trusted me," Lucy said acidly. "It may not have been what anyone _wanted_ but do you really think I'd be so horrified by now of you _touching_ me that I'd rather you have your sister thrown out an airlock?"

"Oh for God's sake," snapped Martha, and Tish banged her head on the door jerking in shock. "If you two are done with your little lovers' spat about how Tish has the nerve to respect your boundaries, some of us are trying to sleep."

" _Martha?!_ "

"Martha Jones?"

"No, the other Martha, Saxon, who the hell'd you expect down here?"

"It's not a _lovers'—_ "

"Shut up, Tish. Saxon, stop yelling at my sister for having _actual_ _human decency_."

"I'm not—"

"Yes," said Martha, "you are. That is _exactly_ what you're doing. And while it's a perfectly normal coping mechanism, it's both harmful and _physically painful_ to listen to." She sighed impatiently. "And Tish, stop beating yourself up, all right? You're just as much a victim as her."

"But—"

"It wasn't your idea, you didn't want to do it, he made you, coerced consent is not consent, do I seriously need to go over this with you right now, Tish, I'm trying to _sleep."_

"Nice to see you again, too," Tish griped.

"Hey, Tish. How's the weather been?"

"Cloudy with a chance of Theta having a breakdown."

"And there's a tropical depression near Haiti," Lucy added helpfully.

"…Thank you, Lucy," said Martha after a confused pause in which she seemed to be trying to figure out whether she was serious. "Tish, how's the Doctor been, really? Last time I saw him he didn't… seem like himself. I mean. He was murdering people with a razor, very… Sweeney Todd."

"Theta's been doing better lately," Tish said. "Ey only threw up twice this week."

Another pause while Martha absorbed this. "Ah. So he—ey's going by Theta now, that's not just the Master?"

"Yeah. And… don't call em 'Doctor', it's just kind of… sad. Ey doesn't like it."

"Theta isn't h—isn't eir real name, is it? The witches said ey didn't have one."

"The _witches_ …?"

Lucy interrupted. "Theta is what ey's calling emself," she said with surprising firmness. "It's not as if eir real name was _The Doctor_ , either, after all."

Tish could actually hear Martha's raised eyebrow. "Fair enough," she said slowly, and the underlying _Tish, your girlfriend's a bitch_ was so strong she almost snapped _She's not my girlfriend!_ before realising that Martha hadn't actually said anything.

There was an awkward silence.

"So… Lucy, huh?" Martha asked with forced casualness. "Not sure I want to know how that one happened."

Tish cleared her throat. "Remember that 'just as much a victim' bit?"

"I helped him," Lucy corrected. "And then I grew up."

There was another, shorter pause. "Right," Martha said. "Well. Welcome to the Resistance, Lucy Saxon."

"Great hospitality you lot have. Love the food. Terrible customer service, though, have you got a manager I can complain to? The staff is terribly rude."

"Shut up, Tish."

* * *

Theta was staring at nothing in particular. Ey hadn't been able to sleep, it was too empty and ey should have been able to sense the timelines and hear whispered, dreaming thoughts in the back of eir mind but there was _nothing_ and all ey could think about was Lucy and Tish and Martha and the guard ey knew was standing outside the door.

The Master called in the guard and Theta bit back a whimper as the door opened. He'd not hurt em, hadn't shown any indication of a desire to, ey was fine, ey'd be _fine…_ Ey pressed emself back into the foot of the bed.

The Master spoke to the guard, a short few phrases of English, before looking down at Theta with distaste in his eyes. He'd not spoken to Theta in days now, and when ey heard Gallifreyan pass his lips ey looked up in shock.

"I expect you to be at the Paradox Machine in an hour," the Master said to em, and then laughed and turned to address the guard again, letting the TARDIS translate for him. "Give them your watch."

The guard saluted before unclasping a leather band from his wrist and laying it on the ground in front of Theta. He didn't touch em except when it was completely necessary, after the first day. That didn't make it any less humiliating when Theta obediently strapped the watch on with unpracticed fingers. The Master laughed again and left, and the guard finally reached down and unlocked Theta's handcuffs, stepping back as ey pulled eirself awkwardly to eir feet. He stood aside and inclined his head towards the door, a silent instruction.

The dressing room felt horribly empty without Tish or Lucy, and the guard standing in the corner made em feel sick; the only concession he made was to avert his eyes while Theta quickly changed out of eir chemise with shaking hands (ey knew he could still see em in his peripheral vision, but it was better than it might have been). The robes were difficult to put on without any help, whether it be from Innocet or Koschei or, most recently, Tish, and ey felt horribly rushed trying to get them on right, looking at eir wrist every few minutes to check the time. When ey had to leave to see the Master, ey knew ey looked déshabillé at best, pulling at the folds to get them to lay as best ey could as ey was led down the halls.

If it had been agonising stepping into the cannibalised TARDIS the first time, it was nothing compared to this, running a hand along her hull and feeling her shaking with pain but not able to sense _anything_ , not able to talk to her and have her hear. Ey knew she was screaming but couldn't feel even a hint of her presence, and ey felt cold and empty and _silent_ and like ey was standing in her corpse.

The Master was waiting for them, leaning casually against what had once been her console, and even with her so strange and untouchable Theta had to fight not to cringe, not to yell _don't touch her._

"Right on time," he said warmly, and Theta sighed with relief that ey could understand him for now. He waved the guard off, and the man saluted once more and backed out of the TARDIS. "Very good, Theta. You've been so cooperative, haven't even complained once! I'm very proud of you," he said, putting a hand on Theta frills and ey was torn between fear and relief at the touch. "I think it's been long enough, don't you agree?" Theta nodded, heartsbeat quickening.

"Good Theta," the Master purred, and without so much as a warning he ripped the remnants of eir paper-thin shields out of the way and blasted a path through eir mind.

It _hurt._ It hurt even more than it had last time, because at least then the Master had only been exploiting a connection that already existed; this time he was forcing a new one, raw and sharp like he was carving it with a razor and Theta could _feel_ the neurons being stripped and rewired, could feel the snapped connections as they were dragged forcefully back into place by that swirling maelstrom of black smoke and red sparks as his TARDIS struggled to control the shift of energy.

She was fighting him so hard, all metaphorically bared teeth and claws, and for a moment ey could even see a flurry of gold as she wound herself around the Master's invading presence and _yanked_ , managing for that one brief instant to channel her own power into Theta's shielding, giving em more strength for eir mental protection than ey'd had since losing her; but she was shackled by the paradox, choking under the too-weak connection the Master was offering. He managed to redirect their combined energies back to Theta's chronal lobe, back to the severed bond, and oh, it _hurt_ when that connection was reformed, when he felt the scarlet flood of pain and rage and hatred and fear and couldn't block it, but the Master couldn't separate them now and neither she nor em could stop the rush of pathetic love, almost of relief, before the brutal healing continued and Theta's mind was overwhelmed so badly ey could barely sense her through the noise.

They were screaming, both of them, their minds entwined and the worldlines converged and knotted and straining in the heart of the paradox and it hurt so much and everything felt raw and open and ey couldn't tell if the taste of blood was a memory or if eir half-healed throat had torn.

Eir legs gave beneath em and ey fell to the floor and the metal grating burnt black marks on eir fingers but ey wasn't aware of anything outside of eir own mind, trying to repair eir shields as best ey could but it was like trying to lay dominoes in an earthquake, structures collapsing faster than ey could put them up.

Theta was barely cognizant of being pulled to eir feet and dragged out of the TARDIS; the pressure in eir head lessening slightly as the Master led em out of the plasmic shell which maintained the sanctity of the paradox; ey could still see the worldlines, fraying and horribly bright and feeling _wrong_ , impossibilities strung together without care… but there _must_ have been care, nothing to this extent could be accomplished unintentionally, and Theta wondered how much the Master's mind must have been twisted by the drums and the War for him to have thought of it at all. It felt like like something Theta emself might have created under the influence of the Other, more magic than science but not really magic as all so much as a long-forgotten discipline from the Pre-Universe, something written about in the Dark Times. The Master had never studied those scrolls, laughing at Theta and Ushas and Ruath when they hadn't thought them useless myth and lore.

"Keep up, Theta," he said shortly, but that was hard when suddenly his hand in eir frills was like a live wire searing and electrifying every last nerve and ey didn't know if it was just overstimulation like had happened to Lucy or if—but no, ey was right, and it was almost a relief to remember the pain of eir TARDIS wrestling the Master and _understand_ what she'd been doing, fighting to stop him from making _too_ many connections too quickly. The Master hadn't just given em eir senses back; he'd _augmented_ them, though why Theta had no idea. And the new connections would fade soon enough, in eighteen hours, maybe in thirty-six; but Theta's mind was too open now, senses heightened to a degree that wasn't natural, wasn't _safe,_ and the TARDIS had known that and she'd tried to protect em even after ey'd failed her so completely.

"Where…" Theta gasped, because they weren't going back to the stairs, the Master was half-dragging em down the corridor and deeper into the ship, this was a place Theta had never been to before but something deep inside em was demanding that ey turn around and walk the other way, saying _there is something wrong here_ and _something very very wrong_ and _turn around, run while you can, it's not right it's not natural it's dangerous it's wrong wrong_ wrong _..._

The Master tutted in reproach. "I expected a bit more loyalty from you, Theta. To see your friends, of course. Don't you miss them?"

Theta's head swam and ey was scared now, afraid that maybe the Master was going to hurt Tish and Lucy and make Theta feel the whole thing but he wouldn't have needed to go through all this trouble if that was his plan and anyway it didn't explain the trepidation that was _screaming_ now, shrieking in eir ears and trying to turn em back, _away_ , ey was _too close no no wrong wrong wrongwrongwrong_.

There was a door at the end of the hall and this must have been near the centre of the ship, burning hot and completely empty and the floor hummed from the proximity of the engines and Theta's frills fanned out reflexively and all ey wanted to do was get _away,_ it felt _wrong_ , felt like death and life and paradox and humanity and the Master had a vicelike grip on eir frills that felt like acid as he opened the door and Theta tried to back away but he pushed em forward forcefully and ey fell to eir knees.

Ey heard the door slam shut behind em and ey could feel the Master's presence vaguely, but it was nearly entirely drowned out by the force of _wrongness_ in the room, like dead Time. Human pheromones hung thick and cloying in the air (c. 4300 H.E.) and ey felt like ey was choking on the mixture.

Theta's senses must have been scrambled, ey thought, because the signals they were sending em didn't make any _sense_ , eir eyes said that the only other thing in the room was a human, a half-naked man tied to a pole like Theta had been once and ey would have panicked at that thought but ey was in pain and _confused._ Because while eir eyes insisted there was only the human everything else was _screaming_ and ey could _feel_ the abomination in the room, the hulking black mass that should not could not _must not exist_ and it occupied the same space as the man even in eleven dimensions and it wasn't _possible_ but it was _there_.

The only explanation ey could think of was possession and that was weak at best, anything with as much power as the eldritch construct wouldn't _need_ to possess a body, it could create one for itself, a four- or five-dimensional shadow of its own natural form…

The man was, ey realised, speaking. "…okay there, Doc?"

Theta tried to hide eir cringe at the name; he was trying to get to em, probably, this was all some highly involved game of the Master's and ey _would not_ play it.

"Long time no see, eh Doctor?" the man said cheerfully, and even through eir determination not to listen to a word he said Theta thought dimly that the voice sounded almost familiar. "Can't say I like Gallifreyan hospitality much. Still, you're certainly a sight for sore eyes."

Theta glared up at the man, or as near as ey could manage; looking directly at him was like looking at a star or a black hole, the four-dimensional form drowned out by the impossible, hulking mass and it _hurt_. "Stop it," ey muttered, and regretted speaking to the man at all a moment later. Ey was playing into the Master's hand.

Ey felt the man's faint twinge of regret for the remark like it was a freight train, a comparatively mild emotion slamming into em and adding to the _noise in eir head_ , and the _wrongness_ was overwhelming and it was crushing em, it felt like a black hole after all, eir sanity was being slowly dragged away by the impossible force of a thing that grated and pulsed and had no place in the universe and it hurt it hurt so much and Theta's entire mind rebelled against it. Ey heaved and shuddered as the human strained suddenly against his bonds and called out the name of a Time Lord that no longer existed but ey didn't care it was too much and ey needed to get out of here _right now._

Ey pulled emself to eir feet with difficulty, running to the door and banging on it as hard as ey could, ey had to get out of here, it was like poison, ey couldn't _breathe._ "Master!" ey screamed, and there was more blood in eir throat and the back of eir mouth but ey hardly noticed. "Master, _please_ , let me out! Master!"

"Doctor, calm down!" the man behind em shouted. Eir only reaction was to knock more frantically.

Ey could feel the Master's mind, just barely. It was almost completely drowned out by the presence in the room, but it was _there_ , he _must_ have been able to hear, and Theta refused to believe he would leave em there. Ey only had to use the right words. "Master, I'm sorry, please, I'm sorry, I'll do whatever you like, just please let me _out_ of here! _Master!_ " ey cried, eir voice cracking on the last word.

"Doctor, it's all right!" the man was shouting. "I'm not gonna hurt you, it's fine, it's me! It's just me!"

Theta was beyond hearing. " _Master_ ," ey whimpered, pressing emself into the door like ey was trying to phase through the metal. It was more of a sob than anything else, helpless and hopeless and no, no, he was going to _leave em here,_ Theta had finally done something so awful the Master wasn't going to come back and ey was going to be trapped in here with that _horrible awful thing_ and it was going to be _forever_ and ey couldn't do it ey couldn't survive it it _hurt_ and then suddenly the door opened and ey stumbled and fell through it and hit eir head on a protruding pipe as ey collapsed but it didn't matter because ey was _out._

"Master," ey whispered.

"Obviously, Theta," said the Master, sounding irritated but not angry, and Theta was so grateful that he wasn't angry ey almost wanted to cry. "Where are you _going?_ "

Theta wasn't sure, all ey knew was that ey wanted to get as far away from this horrible place as possible so maybe eir head would stop _hurting_ and the Master rolled his eyes and grabbed em by the shoulder, turning em around and pushing em back the way they'd come. "The stairs are _that_ way, Theta." Theta bobbed eir head and whimpered gratefully and tried not to look like ey was running away as the Master followed em back through the winding corridors and up the stairs—slowly, so incredibly slowly and ey didn't know how he could _stand_ it but ey didn't dare ask him to go faster. Finally the throbbing pain faded; Theta was still acutely aware of the _wrongness,_ knew it existed but ey could almost ignore it now, and the TARDIS was doing her best to put up her own shields, ey could feel that she was in pain but the pain itself didn't echo along their bond and it felt so wonderful to be able to _sense_ things again. Ey walked right past a guard and didn't even cringe because ey could sense his boredom, could tell he had no interest whatsoever in his Master's alien pet.

It was intoxicating. It was beautiful and solid and Theta felt as close to free as ey was ever likely to feel again.

That was when an alarm went off, bright lights flared, and there was a loud explosion as a helicopter careened past the picture windows and crashed into the hull of the Valiant.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings for this chapter: violence, character death, abuse, suicide.

"Athena," said Silas slowly, "can you _please_ put away the Nitro-9? We don't need it yet."

Athena rolled her eyes and put the canister back in her backpack. One of the first things the girl had said to her was that her mum hadn't let her keep her pink one. She was the youngest person on the helicopter at all of seven ("and three-quarters!") years old, and Donna was faintly horrified she was there at all, but no one else was willing to argue with her when she declared ten minutes before they left that she was coming along.

Still, at least someone back here was cheerful. There were only eleven of them in the helicopter. _Only,_ Donna thought sarcastically. It was all very well for Jo and Cliff, who had the cockpit all to themselves. Jo's laughter floated back even over the sound of the rotors and the awful clanking noise of their dilapidated engine as she jerked it all over the bloody place; she sounded like she was having the time of her life.

Back in the body of the Grant-Joneses' hunk of rattling scrap metal it was a different story. They were all bundled up like they were going to the North Pole; oh, sorry, the _South_ Pole. Natalie Jones had informed her that most of their gear had been recycled from an Antarctic exploration mission, because apparently that was what these people did for _fun._ The only problem was that while their junker had been stripped down of almost everything except cabin pressurisation and the outer shell, squashing nine people together in little more than a square metre, all of them in giant fluffy pants and parkas that made them look like Abominable Snowmen was _stuffy_ and _miserable,_ even if they _hadn't_ had to somehow make room for crowbars and weapons and crash helmets and explosives packs and oxygen tanks from a "recreational Everest climb" three years previous. Which they did.

Not for the first time, Donna realised how insane these people were.

"All right there, Donna?" Mickey yelled from across the cabin.

"I can't feel my feet!" she yelled back. "It's bloody _freezing_ in here!"

Silas shuffled in a circle, awkwardly trying to turn around from where he'd been propped with his head halfway into the cockpit. "It's about to get colder!" he shouted. "ETA three minutes! Oxygen, everyone!"

The woman next to her handed her a mask. It wasn't easy getting eight people and a seven-year-old (though Athena hardly counted; she was ready before any of them) into heavy oxygen tanks with no room to maneuver, but the Grant-Joneses were worryingly good at it and, unlike Donna, Mickey, and Haresh, seemed perfectly cheerful at the prospect of what would most likely end up being a suicide mission.

None of them were actually named Grant-Jones (although there were two Jones-Broadchesters and a Jones-Green) and one of them—Sam, who was Natalie's girlfriend—wasn't related but still managed to have the surname 'Jones'. None of them were apparently related to either Martha _or_ Harriet Jones (former Prime Minister), who were also not related to each other, and it was all in all more confusing than it ought to have been.

Mickey got one arm free with difficulty, lifting it above the heads of the multitude of Joneses and pointing in the vague direction of the barred plastic window he was squished against. He shouted something, but with his oxygen mask already in place it was difficult to get excited about "Mrm mrmmph, mrph mr mrrmmrmrph!"

The helicopter tilted wildly, sending everyone staggering to port and leaving Donna exactly enough time to swear to herself before six Joneses, a Smith and a Chandra crashed into her and smashed her up against the window.

"Ooh! Mickey!" she called when she could breathe again. "Look, it's the Valiant!"

Mickey grumbled.

It wasn't easy to see, hulking metal monolith that it was; the helicopter was teetering back and forth and shaking so hard Donna was having trouble figuring out where the ground was, let alone their target. It was a good thing they'd waited after all; the Joneses had been all for taking their little tin-pot chopper all around the world looking for the Valiant when Bannerman Road had gotten a message to the CRG with strict instructions not to let them leave until they had an actual plan. From the looks of things, anything but a still night while the Valiant was already over Britain would have shaken the thing to pieces.

"Where are you going?" Silas shouted into the cockpit. At least, that's what it looked like he was saying. "You _missed it!"_

"She _missed it?!_ " Donna yelled. "How could she _miss it?_ It's bloody _massive!"_

They had, in fact, missed it. The poor stripped-down former sightseeing helicopter wobbled and whined as Jo executed a turn sharp enough that the sound that came out of Mickey's mouth made Athena look at him with no small amount of concern.

"Here we go!" she called back, and Donna watched as the world outside spun, swung, and finally solidified into a mostly-normal pattern as Jo finally got the chopper to fly in a mostly-straight line.

"Everyone hold on!" Cliff shouted over the noise, and Donna wasted no time in wrapping herself around the straps and handholds that had been installed for the stage of their ingenious plan that involved intentionally crashing the remains of a tourist helicopter into a heavily-armoured military vessel.

Sam had strapped herself to the wall with a view out the front of the cockpit.

"Three…" she shouted back. "Two…"

The shout of "ONE!" was lost in the jolting crash if Sam had managed to say it at all; the sound and feeling was practically all-encompassing, metal crushing agains metal and the roar of the engines and Donna couldn't think. She'd been in a car crash before, just a tiny thing that had resulted in a bit of a dent in the boot; that had been terrifying enough and had nothing at all on _driving a helicopter into an aircraft carrier._ She dimly recognised a joyous shriek from Athena, like this was a theme park ride and not their horrid, fiery death.

Somehow, miraculously, they survived, although it took a few seconds for that to register. Mickey helped her out of the wreckage, and she reminded herself that this was only the start, they were hardly home free yet.

The three not-Grant-Joneses were the last to get out of the wreckage, not unexpectedly, and walking on an open-to-air platform on a flying aircraft carrier thousands of metres above the ground was, suffice to say, an interesting experience, and while she'd been assured that the turrets couldn't turn more than 190º she was still expecting every second for them to spin around and shoot them down.

By the time the three of them got to the access hatch the Grant-Joneses surrounded, Athena already had her Nitro-9 out. Her older brother Wiley had a protective hand on her hood, holding her steady as the wind whipped around them, threatening to throw her off-balance as she set her charges. They couldn't talk; the wind was too loud to have heard anything anyway, even if they hadn't had awkward oxygen masks over their mouths. Still, Cliff's raised fingers were as clear a signal as Donna had ever seen, and they were quick to waddle away from the immediate blast radius as he counted down.

_Six… five… four…_

_BOOM._

Donna was fairly certain she could hear Mickey swearing from across the platform, batting at his flaming sleeve. Athena raised a hand in half-hearted apology, but the Grant-Joneses were already surging forward into the gap, Cliff waving Donna and Mickey through urgently. There was a short hallway on the other side, and Jo was already at the second half of the airlock segment, helping Sam haul it open so the others could squeeze through. There was a spray of gunfire as they unstuck the door, and Sam yelped and slammed it shut again. Athena whistled and tossed Silas a cracked Nitro canister; Sam opened the door enough for him to toss it through, and once they heard the explosion they hurried after it.

There were four guards on the other side, stunned by the blast, and Sam and Silas quickly overtook them; they were zip-tied and unconscious before Donna was entirely sure what she was watching. She thought of Sam's Greenpeace t-shirt and wasn't sure how to reconcile that with hand-to-hand combat like something out of a spy movie. Silas waved over Donna's head, and Jo flashed him a thumbs-up from the airlock door as she sealed it.

"That's everyone," she told him, pulling off her mask and dropping the tank unceremoniously in the corner. The others were quick to follow suit, wriggling out of the thick parkas and oxygen tanks that had been extremely welcome in the freezing wind outside the Valiant but were decidedly less so in the recently-re-pressurised, climate-controlled hallways. "Sarah Jane," she said into what had at one point been a disconnected cell phone but had gone through so many modifications it looked like something out of a science-fiction novel (the fact that their lives were practically one already wasn't lost on her). "Can you hear us?"

"Loud and clear, Jo!" Luke's voice was tinny and crackly over the communicator, which was tied into a tightly-protected connection between the Joneses and the Bannerman Road supercomputer.

Supercomputer. Sentient, alien supercomputer. Donna was still not entirely sure what she'd gotten herself into, but the alien tech certainly made their Resistance Movement seem much more feasible than tripwires made out of a kettle and some string, and rebuilt helicopter wrecks held together with duct tape and prayers.

"We all remember the plan?" Cliff confirmed. "Donna, Athena, Mickey, Wiley, Jo, this is you." They were the jailbreak party; the Doctor's friends were somewhere on the Valiant, they had a general idea where, and they were the half that was going to get them out.

"Work fast," Sarah Jane told them over the communicator. "The Master will try to stop you. Don't stop to fight, just get to Martha and anyone else as quickly as you can."

They had all studied the ship's plans; Mickey had access to some UNIT files through something he'd done with the Doctor and hadn't really explained in detail, looking embarrassed. It hadn't really mattered, anyway; so long as they had accurate blueprints of the Valiant _how_ they'd gotten them didn't matter overmuch. The corridors all looked nearly identical, but if they were where she thought they were, they shouldn't be too far away from the storerooms everyone had unanimously agreed were most likely to have been turned into cells.

"Once you've got the prisoners out, get to the Paradox Machine," Silas reminded them. "If there's one thing Martha made clear it's that the Paradox Machine is the key. A few Nitro-9 charges should damage it enough to make everything the Master's done worthless. The rest of us are going after him directly. We need to make sure he knows we're there, bait him out…"

Over the communicator, Clyde snickered. There was a smack and a muffled " _Rani!"_ before Sarah Jane was back on the line.

"Good luck, Jo," she said. "Remember, you need to get the communicator to a computer terminal as soon as you can; K-9 and Mr Smith are diverting all our power into taking control of the Valiant, just in case. Sam, don't let them do anything crazy."

"Who, me?" asked Sam, cold-cocking a groaning guard with an oxygen tank.

"Watch it!" Mickey yelled suddenly. A group of guards had swung around the corner and opened fire on the group. Wiley knocked Jo and his sister out of the way as everyone with guns—which, Donna realised belatedly, included her—fired back.

She'd never killed anyone before. She'd fought, she'd nearly died herself, but she'd never killed anyone, and watching the guards fall back, she had no way of knowing if she'd hit them or not but she was _involved_ and it made her feel sick. Sam made a face that Donna was pretty sure looked not too dissimilar from her own as she looked back on the rest of their group and her eyes went wide.

The guards weren't the only ones to have fallen. John was on the ground, and Sam leant over him to check his pulse but it was only cursory; Donna knew as well as she did that no one missing that much of their skull could be alive.

They could only spare a moment of silence. "Let's move," Mickey said quietly, and the two groups ran towards opposite ends of the hallway.

* * *

"I spy with my little eye… something—"

"A bulkhead."

" _No_ , actually, it's _not_ , and if you'd have let me _finish—_ "

"Pipes."

"…I hate you."

"No you don't."

A pause. She could hear Lucy shifting on the other side of the wall, and sighed. "Martha, it's your turn."

"I spy with my little eye… something green."

"Is id your socks?" Lucy said.

Tish rested her forehead against the bars. "Is there some sort of weird mold on your wall?"

"No," said Martha. "Well, yeah, but it's not green. It's the light on the door lock over there."

"I can't see the door locks from here, Martha," Tish reminded her. Lucy sneezed miserably in agreement. It had been inevitable that one of them would get sick from the cold and the terrible ventilation down here. Trophy wives and society girls weren't exactly cut out for drafty metal boxes.

"Can we blease blay somethig else?" she asked thickly.

"You okay, Lucy?" Tish asked, trying to see around her window. "You don't sound so good." A pale hand strained into her field of vision and gave an awkward thumbs-up.

She heard Martha heave a sigh from the other side of Lucy's cell. "How long do you reckon we have until he remembers we exist?"

"Er," said Tish. "Maybe another day or two?"

"It brobably debends on if Theta asks him."

"…Or three. How mad did he look?" Lucy didn't answer, but Tish could feel the tension from the next cell. "Well," she said, trying and failing to be comforting, "at least he's not mad at you this time?" After another few moments of silence, she sighed. "What do you think he'll do to us?"

"Well, from personal experience," said Martha, "he's very fond of keeping people in cells and gloating at them."

Lucy laughed. It turned into a wet cough. "He never uses the sabe trick twice," she said once she was done hacking up a lung.

_Thank God,_ Tish thought. She didn't know if Lucy could have survived a repeat of past 'tricks'. She didn't know if she could have survived them at all. How wrong was it, she wondered, to be grateful that so many horrific punishments had already been directed at her friend?

"Do either of you know how Jack is doing?" Martha asked.

"Who?" said Lucy.

"Yeah, he's doing fine," Tish said. "As well as can be expected, anyway."

There was a pause. Finally, Martha sighed.

"I spy…"

Whatever she spied was quickly forgotten as alarms went off, bright, flashing lights on the wall legally-mandated disability assistance and more than a bit irritating after they'd been going for more than a minute. It was still better than the awful klaxon sounds.

"What's going on?" Martha shouted.

"I don't know!" Tish called back. "Lucy?"

Lucy's voice sounded awful, but she managed to yell "The Valiant's under addack, those are the external defense turrets cobing online. Fighter blanes, I think!"

"Martha, do any of your Resistance friends have fighter planes?"

"We don't even have _cars,"_ said Martha.

"Do they have guns?" Tish said. "That was definitely gunfire!"

"The _guards_ hab guns!" Lucy shouted.

"Think positive!"

"Some of them do!" Martha said at the same time. "Jo's kids raid military camps!"

" _Kids_?"

Tish could hear footfalls at the door, and a muffled, feminine voice saying something she couldn't make out. The door swung open.

"Hello?"

"Donna Noble, is that you?" said Martha.

"No, it's Mr Smith. _Yes_ , it's Donna!"

"Is that Mickey?"

"Hey, Martha," said a grinning man with a large gun who somehow managed to look entirely non-threatening. "And… Tish, right? Mickey Smith. Chiswick Resistance."

Tish waved at him through the bars.

"And who's… what's _she_ doing here?"

Tish couldn't see Lucy, but she knew what her face would look like; that awful glassy mask she wore when she was afraid.

"She's with us," and Tish blinked in surprise that it was Martha who said it first. "Lucy Cole, you've probably heard of her. She tried to assassinate the Master. She's a friend."

Donna raised her eyebrows but didn't say anything, and the two kids—they really were _kids,_ that girl couldn't possibly be older than ten and looked closer to five, and the boy was maybe sixteen at most—moved forward.

"Stand back," said the teenager, holding out his hand so that the little girl could hand him a faded shaving-cream can. "I mean _way_ back, this stuff'll take your head off."

Tish took him at his word, backing as far into the corner as she could. A pause, then the sound of a cap being pulled off. After a few seconds, there was a really extremely loud and impressive _BANG_ and the solid iron door jumped on its hinges before tilting slowly over and falling with a slightly less impressive bang onto the floor of the cell. A second later there was another explosion next to the first, and then a third.

"Quick," Mickey told them. He gestured urgently. "Someone will've heard that."

"Was that Nitro-9? Good old Ace." Martha said warmly as they rushed out of the room and down the hall. "Where is she?"

Everyone got a sort of sort of sickly look about them.

"Oh, no," Martha breathed.

"She was in Japan," Donna said quietly. Tish blanched. She didn't know who they were talking about, but everyone knew what _that_ meant.

"I'b sorry," Lucy told her.

"It's not your fault," said Martha. Tish put an arm around her to hold her steady; she looked a lot sicker than she'd realised. Just a cold, but she was feverish and looked like she hadn't slept properly since she'd been locked up. She needed someplace soft and warm and safe to rest up in. They all did, really.

"Is the man from Torchwood still alive?" said the little girl, sounding very serious for someone who was little more than a metre tall and had plastic beads on the ends of her braids.

"…Yes," said Martha with some difficulty; it wasn't that it was _funny_ , not by any means, but _oh dear god_.

"Do you know where he's being held?" asked Mickey. "We need to get everyone out."

"Just down this hall," said Tish, grateful she had something to add. "He's got his own section, with—"

"Guards!" Lucy said sharply. She'd no sooner gotten the word out before the first shots were fired; Martha pushed the two of them around the corner on pure instinct and looked for all the world like she ought to have a gun in her hand alongside Mickey, Donna, and the teen.

The little girl was pulling something out of her pack and Tish put her arm out to stop her from getting into the line of fire, but she ducked beneath her and threw something down the corridor. A moment later there was a loud explosion. Tish looked at the girl and her proud grin and felt like she should have been shocked, but couldn't manage it.

The gunfire hadn't stopped, but there was only one person firing now, as far as she could tell. She watched Mickey and the teen round the corner, guns aloft, and there was a hail of bullets and a spray of blood.

Her heart was beating fast and it felt like she was treading ice water or stuck in slow-motion; the little girl ran out into the hall screaming "Wiley!" and she waited, helplessly, to watch her shot down, and when that didn't happen it took a moment to process it; she'd cringed away and she could have sworn she'd heard a gunshot but then there was silence and she was still alive.

Or, oh, not silence, not entirely. "Wiley," the little girl was saying, leaning over the teen. "Wiley, Wiley, Wiley, _Wiley—_ "

Wiley made a sharp sound that wasn't entirely dissimilar from a laugh and tried to pull himself up to a sitting position, but the girl—and they must have been siblings, Tish realised belatedly, or close enough—pressed him back into the floor.

"Don't you _dare_ ," she growled (the effect wasn't entirely lost by everything else about her, and inside her head, Tish applauded). "You're wounded."

"'Thena, I'm fine," Wiley argued.

"No you're not!"

"Athena," said Mickey, firmly but not unkindly, "I need you to move, okay? Let us help Wiley. Martha?" he called.

"On it." Martha paused long enough to duck around the corner and wrestle a large gun from one of the dead guards before hurrying back. "Here, let me see…"

Lucy's fingers dug into Tish's arm. "More guards," she whispered. "They would hab had to cobe bast Harkness' chamber. Those guards'll be along in a minute iv they don't hear frob these ones."

Tish nodded, squeezing her hand gratefully once she realised Lucy was in fact attempting to speak English. "Um… Mickey, Lucy says there's more guards waiting for these ones to come back. If you want to get Jack out you should do it now, they're using it as a staging area or something."

Donna and Mickey exchanged a look as Martha carefully tore Wiley's sleeve off to get a look at the ugly bullet wound in the young man's shoulder.

"We'll have to come back for him," Mickey said. "If we start going _back…"_

"We need to get to the Paradox Machine," Donna informed the group at large. She looked uncomfortable, the military-grade weapon in her hands seeming both unfamiliar and surprisingly natural. "If we can damage it… Well, I don't actually _know_ what it does, _some_ people never _explained…_ "

"I was in a _bit_ of a hurry, Donna," Martha muttered. She looked around and hissed with frustration at the lack of medical supplies to be found lying strewn about the floor of a row of cells on a military airship. "Seriously, the Master doesn't keep first-aid kits? They just grazed your side," she told Wiley gently. "The shoulder's bleeding a lot too but it's not as bad as it could be, I don't think it hit anything important. You can feel your toes, right?"

Wiley gave a terse smile and bumped her leg with his foot. "Not really concerned about toes, but..."

"Here." She shrugged out of her jacket, folded it into a rough pad-like shape and pressed it over the wound. "Keep pressure on it until we can come back for you, all right? And keep that other arm tight against your side, there you go. We can't leave him," she added in the same breath.

"Well we can't exactly bring him with us, can we?" Donna did not seem to like standing out in the open waiting for more guards to arrive.

Lucy spoke up again. "Use the cells," she said, and the others looked up in surprise at the even determination in her voice. "Sed him ub in there and close the door, they won't bother lookig for him. Iv we win we can cobe back for him."

"Mickey, get him in there. _Carefully,"_ Martha ordered. "Don't aggravate that shoulder wound."

"Careful!" Athena yelped as Mickey switched places with Martha, leaving her to cover the corridor while he slipped an arm under Wiley's good shoulder and started pulling him into one of the cells that hadn't recently had the door blasted off its hinges.

"Tish?" Martha asked from her corner. "Paradox Machine, where is it and how do we get there?"

"How should I know?" Tish hissed back. "If the Master didn't need it fed or polished…"

Lucy coughed loudly. It may or may not have been solely to get everyone's attention, as it went on for several long seconds.

"One lebel ub," she sniffled. "Dree halls on the righd, sharp lebt."

There's another rattle of gunfire, this time from Martha.

"Let's get going, then," she said. "Out of time here."

* * *

Theta had counted it a blessing that the Master hadn't made a show of executing eir past companions. Ey knew it was no more than ey deserved to see it, but _they_ didn't deserve to be hurt, not for a simple association with em that, in many cases, they didn't even choose so much as it was forced upon them by outside forces or Theta emself.

Ey hoped Sarah Jane was still alive. Ey thought she might be, the Master was absent-minded enough in this incarnation and Lucy said she'd cut off the transmission, so there was a chance.

The Master held Theta to his side and ey looked at the assembled group in front of em, surrounded by guards with their guns raised, and ey wished for the third time in as many days that ey had tear ducts with which to weep. There were too many of them and at the same time too few; Jo and Cliff and two of their children, grown now and they'd been armed, hard-faced, defiant, one of them covered in blood, and what was Sam even _doing_ here? The thought of any one of them dying like this was too much but _all of them together_ … they were only a handful, what could they possibly have been thinking, the greatest mistake ey had ever made was in convincing them that courage and audacity were all that was needed to triumph against impossible odds, this was _suicide._

"Theta, look!" the Master said brightly, caressing eir frills and it felt uncomfortable to be on display like this now and ey didn't know why. "It's your human friends! Why, Josephine's grown up, hasn't she? I have to say, it's a bit strange to see one of your companions live long enough to get wrinkles."

Theta winced; ey wanted to pull away from him but he was holding onto em too tightly and all ey could manage was to raise eir chin, almost haughtily.

"And that's the one you designed, isn't it? The one who killed herself for you? What is she called again…"

"Sam," ey said, looking at her desperately. She caught eir gaze and gave a tiny nod.

"Oh, right. Samantha, the perfect companion. Blonde, young, human, utterly smitten with you, and _moralising_ ," said the Master with disdain. "You know, I question your taste, Theta. Still," he sighed, "I suppose anything's better than the one you dragged into the Time War with you. At least he died quickly enough."

"You'll die quicker!" It was one of the many Grant-Joneses that Theta had never met, but couldn't possibly have mistaken for anyone else. There were weapons strewn around their feet where they'd been forced to set them once they were surrounded, but he didn't try to grab one; the words were defiant and rallying but not an immediate threat. His parents had raised him well.

The Master was considerably less impressed. Looking almost bored, he flicked his laser screwdriver out of an inside pocket. There was a high-pitched whirr and a flash of red light, and Theta silent screaming protest was matched by Jo's cry of " _Silas!"_ as the man twitched and crumpled. His sister started forward to catch his body, but Sam—moving faster than Theta would have expected of anyone else—grabbed her first, locking an arm around her waist and a hand over her mouth and pinning her in place. It was almost cruel. It almost certainly saved her life.

"You know," the Master drawled, "I somehow doubt that. Your little… what is this, your idea of a _strike force?_ Earth's deadliest assassins: two-washed up tree-huggers and their brood? And a schoolteacher," he amended. "What is it with those, Theta? Though you seem to have lost that one rather quickly. And _rudely._ Blood all over the hall."

"You didn't have to do that," Theta whispered. Ey knew ey should be quiet, knew there was nothing ey could do anymore for them, they'd come here to kill the Master, to foil his plans. ( _And oh, well done Jo, Sam, to have made it this far!)_ Ey was so proud of them, of their courage and nerve to have tried but now ey had to watch them die pointlessly and ey didn't want that to happen.

"Theta," said the Master lowly, and there was no mistaking the warning in his voice despite the otherwise light tone. "It's nice to see you again, Ms Grant!"

Jo's face was twisted up in pain, her grip white on Cliff's hand, but her voice was hard and clear. "I'm afraid I can't say likewise," she said.

Theta couldn't see the Master's face, his tight grip on eir frills forcing eir gaze forward (and how ey'd _love_ to have the same range of motion in eir retinas as humans had, as ey'd once had with eir adapted shimmer), but ey could well imagine the caricature of a scowl that had formed on it, like a cartoon character's frown. "Well that's hardly polite of you, Ms Grant," he said.

"It's Mrs Jones now," she replied shortly, and it _hurt_ to see her like this, to see her angry. She never ought to have been.

"Oh, how convenient! See, I've already got one of those."

"Have a collection going, have you?" said Sam, so conversationally Theta couldn't tell if it was intended to be biting or sincere.

"Of a sort, Samantha, of a sort. Anyway, I don't need two Mrs Joneses around. Or _Mr_ Joneses, for that matter," he added, nodding to Cliff. "That would only be confusing. So that makes the question of what to do with you all rather easier. Theta," he said, fingers carding through eir frills. "Say goodbye."

Theta didn't respond. Ey was listening to something else entirely.

There was a roaring in eir ears, growing louder and louder every moment like a flash flood. And something behind it, chasing it, a shockwave after the sound of an explosion, something huge and perfect and intensely _powerful_ that ey could just barely begin to sense and it was _coming_ and ey laughed with the fierce, contagious _joy_ of it.

"Theta," the Master snapped, and then he froze, and Theta knew he'd finally sensed it too.

His face transformed into the kind of rage Theta hadn't seen even after the ibuprofen. "No," he hissed, and then " _No!_ That's not _possible! What did you do?"_ and nobody had to answer him because that was when the shockwave caught up.

The TARDIS snapped her chains like a caged eagle breaking free, shrieking with rage and pain and triumph, spreading wings of flame and fury that were hot and vicious and _gold_ again in eir mind and it hurt but it was the pain of a bone being put back in place, the pain of a long-withheld truth finally told. For a moment she revelled in being _free_ , stretching her wings and lifting her head to feel the sky again, and Theta fancied ey could almost taste the Vortex on eir tongue.

And then the moment was over, and she opened her claws.

The Toclafane were the first to fall, sparking as they swarmed around the Valiant and disintegrating before eir eyes, dragged away to where their pain had never happened. Wind, temporal and physical, began to pick up around them, swirling in a swiftly-intensifying spiral around the TARDIS at the heart of the Valiant and the echoing groan of shifting Time came up, loud as the roar of engines and the most beautiful sound Theta had ever heard.

Timelines had been ripped out of their rightful places in failed, long forgotten realities and melded into an abomination, the reflection of the Web of Time as shown in a carnival mirror, to support the paradox. Now that it had been broken, they began to disentangle themselves. Some of them unravelled entirely, having nothing to latch onto now; those had only formed after the Not-Web had been created, a natural progression that now couldn't possibly be maintained, and the TARDIS and Theta alike felt an incorporeal weight lifted, the Web of Time made intact once more for the first time in a span/never/forever and they laughed together with mingling, desperate, ethereal voices in the higher dimensions.


	13. Chapter 13

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: violence, character death, abuse, xenophobia, references to rape.

The guards, Theta was slowly realising, were really only very simple men. They hadn't signed up for anything like this; when they realised that something had changed, that the Master's power was broken, when they looked out the windows and saw Earth clean and new again, the ones who didn't drop their weapons and surrender were quickly taken care of or pulled to the ground by the ones who had. Two or three of them even switched sides openly, joining the Jones clan in levelling reclaimed weapons at the Master. He was slightly dazed by the fundamental changes made by the universe on a subatomic level and in dimensions the humans didn't leave a shadow in, let alone could sense; during the Last Great Time War, a lot of these sort of changes had happened—after all, the nature of a Time War was that the Web of Time itself was a battlefield and a weapon—and Theta had described it to Fitz near the beginning with no small amount of difficulty.

Imagine, Theta had said (except ey had been the Doctor then, and zie rather than ey), you're having a conversation with a group of people, and then you go to the loo and change your clothes. Your new clothes are almost, but not quite, the same: they're made of a slightly different material and they're a different colour. You're aware of both of these facts and a million more besides, like how the sleeves pinch a bit at your armpits and this shirt is dry-clean only. The people you were talking to will notice, when you return, that you've changed your clothes; weren't you wearing green a moment ago? They do not know that it feels different to wear, they don't know what the exact sort of cotton-poly blend the fabric is. And the people you weren't talking to, people you talk to later, they're not aware that you changed at all. Haven't you always been wearing that?

Fitz had asked what that had to do with a Time War, but zie had been a bit distracted and hadn't replied except to ask Fitz if he would please pull that lever, the green one right there? Thank you, Fitz.

It was a rubbish metaphor anyway, and, oh, ey'd gotten distracted again, hadn't ey? In any case, the Master was distracted by a suddenly rather rougher metaphorical fabric. Theta felt as though ey'd gone from wearing thick, scratchy wool to silk, and was just as distracted emself.

The Master's fingers wrapping themselves in a death grip on eir frills brought em back. Ey could feel his anger and desperation as everything he had thought secured and unchangeable was torn from his grasp, and ey could feel exactly how far he was willing to go to get some semblance of control back.

Ey could very much feel the cold hum of a laser screwdriver against eir temple.

"I think," the Master enunciated carefully, "That you'll all be putting those down _right now._ "

"It's over, Master!" yelled Natalie (it _was_ Natalie, Theta was quite sure, there were just a _lot_ of Joneses). Sam had finally taken her hand away from her mouth while they were clinging to each other in the middle of the hurricane. "You lost, give it up!"

" _No_ ," the Master snapped, and Theta could feel the drums now, fast and angry and insane against eir temples. "You can't even comprehend what I can do! I still have a TARDIS," he snarled, digging his nails into Theta's frills so hard they drew blood, cutting off eir protest that she was _eir_ TARDIS. "You think this was about Earth? _Keep_ your _miserable_ little planet, for now. I can have _anywhere._ Anywhere I choose! So you just stay _exactly_ where you are and I'll _consider_ not putting a mining-intensity laser through dear Theta's skull."

Theta watched miserably as, slowly, the Joneses listened to him. Guns were lowered, knives pulled from boots reluctantly tucked back away. The three or so guards who'd joined them hesitated, kept their weapons up longer; Sam pointedly aimed a handgun at the nearest guard's thigh and they hurriedly stood down.

He would do it. Theta knew that much; he would hold that laser to eir head and drag em into the TARDIS and none of them would stop him because for some reason they thought eir life was worth it and they were _wrong_. The Master was going to be loose in the universe like this, broken and angry and volatile and Theta couldn't let that happen.

Ey stood stock-still, not as much daring to breathe, and tried eir best to drown out the slightest hint of a plot under fear, hoping the Master wouldn't pay enough attention to notice that it wasn't fear for emself.

One.

Two.

Ey grabbed the Master's screwdriver out of his hand, pulling away from him; his nails bit sharp into eir frills, tearing the flesh as ey twisted out of his grasp. The Master stared at em with shock that hadn't yet morphed into anger.

" _Theta,"_ he hissed, and then—

"Don't, they're with us!"

Theta was going to point out to Sam that yes, that was rather the problem, and then realised not only was she not talking about em she was not in fact talking to the Master at all. Ey didn't even need to look; now that eir nerves were no longer stripped raw and screaming it didn't hurt to be in the same room as Jack—and ey remembered him, now, remembered everything and tried not to be afraid because Jack was very human and very male and very much bigger than Theta but he was a friend and Jack wouldn't hurt em. It was incredible, being able to recognise people so easily now that the TARDIS was back, humming lovingly in the back of eir mind; but ey wouldn't have needed her help to recognise the hulking eleven-dimensional abomination that was Jack Harkness.

"Sure we can't shoot them anyway?" Tish did not look terribly impressed by the guards' newfound loyalty to the human race. "Just a little bit?" Lucy elbowed her lightly, as best as could be managed while she was clinging to her arm like a security blanket, and she rolled her eyes. "Fine. If we're all done up here, can someone _please_ get Lucy a cough drop or something? She hurts to listen to."

"Thangs a lod."

"We're not quite done," Martha said, and there was steel in her voice that Theta didn't like. "What're we planning to do with _him?_ "

"Or her, for that matter." Lucy flushed and shrank back at Sam's accusational look.

Mickey stepped forward. "Martha says she's with us. She was locked up just like the others."

Tish looked like she was ready to argue the point, but Sam accepted it. "Fine. What about the Master, though? And the guards. Tell me we're not just letting those bastards go."

"I zhould thing nod."

"All right," Donna said. "Someone needs to get her something, _right_ now, she's making _my_ throat hurt."

"Don't worry," Jack said with a winning smile. "I'll take care of every—"

" _Focus!"_ Tish jumped as Martha snapped them all to attention.

Theta was fairly certain even the humans could feel the Master's rush of anger at that. "What now, Theta?" he sneered, stalking towards em. "All your precious _companions—_ "

"Try and touch him!" And then he froze, because Martha and Mickey and Jack and… that red-haired woman seemed familiar… all four had guns trained on him and Sam and Natalie were making their way carefully up the steps towards them.

"Go to Jo, Doctor," Sam said evenly, and ey wished they would all _stop calling em that,_ that wasn't eir _name_ , that wasn't who ey _was_ anymore. "Or Tish. We'll handle this. It's almost over."

"Come on, Theta," Tish called when ey didn't move. Ey _couldn't,_ ey was frozen, ey didn't know what to _do._ "We can see what you've really got in those wardrobes, find you some more comfortable robes. You know Lucy likes to play fashion show."

"I lige to experimend wid possibilidies," Lucy corrected her with a cool flip of her dirty hair. Theta could sense her tension even from here, but ey appreciated the effort she was putting into sounding casual and… and wearing something that didn't have the Master's seal on it sounded _awfully_ nice, and it was Tish and Lucy, everything was so overwhelming and all ey really wanted was to be somewhere safe and alone with them.

Tish held out her hand to em and ey took it uncertainly. The warm, human heat of it was more calming than anything and Theta wove eir fingers in between hers.

"Come on," she murmured encouragingly. Theta looked back to the Master, surrounded by humans with guns but not paying them any mind; he was staring at em with something that wasn't quite anger in his eyes. _You've done something very bad, Theta,_ ey could hear in the back of eir head, and wasn't sure if it was eir imagination or not, _but you can still earn my forgiveness._ Tish must have sensed eir hesitation, for she tugged at em gently. Eir eyes left the Master's and ey let her lead em away.

The rest of the Resistance was talking amongst themselves, assigning duties and planning their next move. "I'll take care of him," said Jack Harkness, and he must have been referring to the Master; ey could feel the righteous anger he practically radiated.

"What are you going to do with him?" Theta asked, and if everyone hadn't gone silent at that ey would have been worried if they could even hear em, eir voice hardly more than a whisper (ey'd been right in assuming eir vocal chords would never manage to heal).

Sam's eyes fell.

"Let's get the kids," Martha said quietly. She'd come from one of the adjoining rooms holding a large first-aid kit. Jo and Cliff glanced between her and Theta, and while Jo made a little noise like she wanted to say something, the three of them left quickly.

Theta looked around at the others. "…What? What are you going to do with him?"

Natalie—it _was_ Natalie, ey was quite sure now—stepped forward carefully, setting her gun on the ground. "It's going to be all right, Doc… Theta. Just go with Tish, all right? We'll deal with him. You've done what you can. Leave the rest to us, yeah?"

Tish was pulling at eir elbow now , gently but insistently, with Lucy at eir other side trying to nudge em along; but ey still heard Sam when she turned to Jack, nodded at the Master and said in an undertone, "Do it fast. For zir sake."

Ey started to ask "Do what?" but the words died in eir throat as ey came to the realisation (and it was obvious enough, it was even _understandable_ , and ey should have figured it out sooner). "No," ey breathed, "no, no, stop, _stop_ it, no, you _can't_ —" Eir voice broke and ey jerked away from Tish in a panic.

"Don't." And it was the red-haired woman again and _now_ ey could remember her, vaguely; Donna, ey thought her name was, and she was holding eir arm. For a moment ey panicked even more; but she was sad, not angry, and she didn't have a gun. "Theta, don't, just come with us. It's almost over."

"No," ey said frantically, "No, you can't, it's _my fault_ he's like this, I can help him, I _can,_ I can—he can be _better!"_ Tish and Lucy were herding em away now, ey could feel their tension but they didn't _understand_. "I'm the only one left, I have to, _stop him!"_

Lucy slowed to a stop and ey was almost relieved until she said something to Tish, something quiet and broken that sounded like _I need to watch_ and Tish reached out and squeezed her hand and then it was just her and Donna and ey was struggling against both of them even as ey knew they were only doing what they had to do because the Master was past saving now and ey could feel their misery, that they had to hold em back.

"I'm sorry, Theta," Tish whispered as she held em tucked in an alcove, safely down the hall.

Two shots rang out.

A pause.

And then a third.

Theta screamed.

* * *

"Theta all right?"

Tish slipped out of the dressing room, closing the door behind her. "Not really. Ey's better, though. Stopped screaming. I think Lucy coming back helped. Ey's sort of holding her hand now, I think picking up on… empathic projections, or something."

Right. Aliens. Time Lords. Wasn't the weirdest thing Donna had been involved in since this all started.

"Quite a set of lungs on that one," she commented.

Tish brushed a stray curl out of her face. "Theta doesn't have lungs," she said distractedly.

"Oh, of _course_ ey doesn't." Donna threw her hands up. Aliens. Why not. Tish smiled a bit, but it was strained. Donna could understand that. She was exhausted. They all were.

The guards hadn't put up much of a fight; they'd considered putting them in the cells for the three-hour flight to a UNIT facility, but had decided it was too much trouble. Once Martha and the others had gotten back with Wiley and his sister (who had run back to him the moment the TARDIS storm had subsided), Mr Smith had simply locked all the doors to the lower levels. Someone else could deal with them. Theta had been in hysterics for a long time after the Master's death, and had finally calmed into an almost catatonic misery. Donna wanted to roll her eyes and write off eir heartbroken mourning for a man like the Master as insanity, but she couldn't. Theta was many things but ey was as sane as could be reasonably expected. She could understand why Tish and Lucy cared for em so fiercely.

"Lucy taking care of em, then?" she asked.

Tish nodded, glancing over her shoulder. "She needed to see the Master die. Had to. If he'd done to me what he did to her…" She shuddered. "Only way she could heal, really. But she really did love Harry Saxon. I think Theta understands that. Maybe better than I can." She sighed. "I should go back. You could…" She hesitated. "You could come in, I think. Ey kind of wants to know what's happening. And you don't scare em like the others."

Donna wasn't sure why that was; she'd only met em once, after all, and Sam and Jo had both travelled with em for _years._ It didn't make sense that the one ey didn't cringe away from would be the one ey shouldn't have had any reason to trust. She nodded and followed Tish into the room.

It wasn't large or ornate or anything like that; it had a table and a bench seat and some shelves covered in miscellaneous, unrecognisable things, and there was a door at the back which must have lead to the loo. Theta and Lucy sat together on the bench and she knew Theta was a good bit taller than Lucy but ey looked tiny and frail beside her dressed in only a thin white chemise, clasping her hand like it was a lifeline and shaking just enough for it to be noticeable.

There was a lot of things she could have said, a lot of things she probably _should_ have said. Words to comfort, or words to distract. A bad joke that would get a half-hearted smile but it would have been a _smile_ regardless and that was what mattered. "Theta," she said eventually.

Ey looked up at her through eyes which had no business being readable, as alien as they were. It was like looking at a spider and knowing it hated itself. Ey _was_ a bit like a spider, she thought, with the eyes and the strange, shiny casing on eir fingers like armour. Her granddad's voice in the back of her head: _It's more scared of you than you are of it._

"Do you… do you want to go?"

Lucy and Tish looked up at her in surprise, but she was watching Theta. And after a pause, ey nodded.


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: references to abuse, references to character death, references to rape.

There was stunned silence in the Bunker as the storm outside died down.

"Temporal shields holding, Mistress!" K-9 squeaked happily. "Feedback from alternate timeline fading."

"Good boy, K-9," said Sarah Jane, sounding a bit breathless.

"Do we still have control of the Valiant?" asked Luke.

"Yes, Luke," the computer answered serenely. "Estimated arrival at UNIT Headquarters in 2 hours and 7 minutes."

"I wonder what's going on up there," Santiago murmured, looking at the ceiling like he expected to be able to see the Valiant through steel walls and metres of dirt.

"Jo can handle it, whatever it is," said Clyde. "I think. Probably."

"She can," Santiago confirmed. Rani wished she had his confidence. "All of them can." Luke reached out and squeezed his hand, and, belatedly, she remembered all of Santiago's family members who hadn't shown up.

There was another long, strained silence.

"…Mum?" Luke said finally. "Does this mean we…"

"…Can _get out of here!_ " Rani hadn't seen Sarah Jane look this happy since they'd discovered non-dehydrated actual granola bars among the Grant-Joneses' rations. Her enthusiasm was contagious; Clyde whooped and scrambled over Rani to get to the hatch. Luke and Santiago laughed while they pulled each other onto their feet and ran after him, but then Santiago tripped over K-9 (who requested sharply that he desist improper handling of the K-9 unit) and ended up stumbling into the wall and Luke shrieked and yanked his hand away to stop himself from breaking his nose on the metal door.

Sarah Jane sighed.

"Come on," she said with a smile, and Rani grinned and jumped up. They climbed up out of the trapdoor just a _little_ bit slower than the boys; they had to stop so Sarah Jane could hand K-9 to Rani. He wiggled his ears at her, which she had learned meant he was happy, so she kissed his nose. He didn't even protest that physical gestures of affection were unnecessary, so she was pretty sure he was happy to be out of the bunker too. Maybe he'd go chase some computer mice. Or was that cats?

Sarah Jane stuck her head out of the trapdoor and looked around in wonder. "I don't believe it…"

Bannerman Road was back.

The carpet-bombed, blackened wasteland it had been reduced to by the Master was no more; everything was green and growing again outside, and they'd emerged right back in the comfortable, homey kitchen of Sarah Jane's house, which Rani hadn't been able to fully appreciate in the five seconds she'd had before diving into a bunker while aliens took over the world. It was the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen; warm and golden and welcoming, just a little cramped in all the right ways. It smelled like old books and sunshine, which Rani hadn't even realised until now even _had_ a smell. The television was on in the background; a horse race of some sort, there was nothing important going on today, no First Contact, and definitely no Harold Saxon.

Sarah Jane's neighbours were probably going to think they were all crazy; Clyde had bolted out the door and was currently cheering and kissing the ground and hugging fence posts. Santiago and Luke were also getting in on the kissing and hugging, except they hadn't quite made it outside and were too busy trying to eat each others' faces to do much cheering.

"'scuse me," Rani said loudly, edging between them, "Think my mum's calling…"

She was, and Rani stopped caring about anything else the moment she saw her face. "Mum!" she cried, hugging her tightly. She pressed her face into Gita's shoulder, breathing in the smell of frankincense, sandlewood, and charcoal. She'd always hated her mum's incense—while she had nothing against inviting Lakshmi into the house, she didn't particularly want her in her _clothes—_ but now it was the most beautiful thing she could imagine.

"Rani?" said Gita. "What's this about? You've only been gone ten minutes, you can't have been missing me already!" She looked around. "Oh, have you made friends then? Hello!" she said brightly, disentangling herself from her daughter and pulling at the newly-made creases in her churidar kameez. "I'm Gita Chandra, Rani's mum. You are…?"

"…Sarah Jane Smith," said Sarah Jane, shaking her hand after only a slight hesitation at being introduced to someone she had previously run a planetwide underground resistance with. "My son Luke and I live right across the way, I'm sure he's around somewhere."

Clyde looked up briefly from kissing the ground to wave. "Hi!" he called, "I'm Clyde Langer!"

Rani closed her eyes in exasperation.

"Well, it's a pleasure to meet you," her mum told Sarah Jane. "Rani's a big fan, we had no idea we'd run into you. Oh, and Rani, _where_ is your dad? He's not even seen the back garden yet and I don't have the slightest idea where he ran off to."

Rani's mouth went dry. She'd known what might happen when her dad had joined the Valiant team but it hadn't sunk in yet, not really, and she hadn't considered that she'd be the one to have to tell…

"There was an… emergency," she said haltingly. "At the school." _Yeah, it got blown up by a psychotic Time Lord._ "He had to leave." Sarah Jane squeezed her shoulder gently.

"…Huh," said Gita. "I hope everything's alright."

"I'm sure everything will be fine," said Sarah Jane.

* * *

They had actual _hot_ _water_ for the first time in almost a year (35º wasn't hot, no matter what K-9 said) and they had an actual bathroom with a real actual shower with a showerhead and a drain and a curtain and there were soft towels and soap and _shampoo and conditioner_ and Rani was sure, for a moment, that they hadn't really gotten out, that they hadn't won, that the Master had killed them and this was the afterlife or something, maybe they'd been bombed and she was in a coma…

There was an irritable knock at the door.

"Rani!" Clyde complained. "Leave some for the rest of us! It's Luke's shower, you know!"

"Not while the door's locked," she sang back, but she shut the water off anyway. She was borrowing some of Luke's clothes, as they had all been living off of about three outfits each for a year (they were lucky it was that much, thanks to Jo and her clan) and their clothes were so past saving they were embarrassing as firestarter.

"Yeah, well, you're gonna miss the muffins," Clyde informed her. "They're cool enough to eat in three minutes and going into my mouth in three minutes and two seconds, so…"

Rani lunged for her borrowed trousers. "Don't you _dare!_ " Clyde cackled as he ran downstairs.

Rani's hair was still wet when she skidded into the kitchen two and a half minutes later, but she got there in time to smack Clyde's hand away from the first muffin with a triumphant _"Ha!"_ and burn her tongue on a blueberry. It tasted like victory and also burnt tongue.

"Hey," Clyde complained. "I ran all the way home and back! Sarah Jane…!"

"Clyde!" Sarah Jane responded in the exact same tone of voice. "Behave," she told them both, before adding " _Don't even think about it."_

Rani was somewhat confused until she noticed Luke and Santiago attempting to casually slip upstairs while Sarah Jane's back was turned. Luke muttered something about conserving water and slumped back onto the sofa. Rani felt bad for him, so she threw a muffin at his head.

He turned to flip a V at her, muffin in his other hand, when the doorbell rang.

"I'll get it!" said Clyde, or at least that's what she thought he said; he was talking through a mouthful of blueberry muffin as he jumped up to answer the door. "Hel— _woah_."

Rani craned her neck to see who was at the door but she couldn't see over Santiago's head.

"Sarah Jane?" Clyde called uncertainly.

"Yes, Clyde?"

"…Door's for you."

"Who is it?" Sarah Jane asked as she walked in. "The Grant-Joneses can't have gotten back from UNIT already, they've… Oh," she broke off. "Doctor?"

* * *

The third time Theta aimed them for Bannerman Road, they actually made it. Not only were they at the right house on the right continent, they weren't even three thousand years in the past trying to drag Theta away from fascinating corded pottery, which was apparently more interesting than the alien cult building Stonehenge.

About bloody time.

"…Doctor?"

Donna was exasperated at that—honestly, was it _that_ hard to call em Theta when that was obviously what ey wanted to be called?—but she was too excited to yell. She'd talked with this woman before, of course, but never face-to-face, and she'd _liked_ her.

"Sarah Jane Smith!" she exclaimed, elbowing past Theta to hug her first.

"Donna Noble?!" She didn't need to sound quite so surprised.

"The very same. Great work on that hack, by the way. Made our jobs a whole lot easier."

"I'll remember to thank Mr Smith," said Sarah Jane, looking a bit dazed. Donna sometimes had that effect on people. Natural charm. "Doctor… Theta… ?"

"Please," said Theta with a little smile.

"Theta then," Sarah Jane said after only a momentary hesitation. "What are you doing here? I assumed you'd go with UNIT…"

Theta flinched, and Donna decided to spare em having to answer. "Oh, you know," she said carelessly. "Got the TARDIS back, grabbed the first person ey saw, swanned off to see the universe. Is there always that much running?"

"Yes," Sarah Jane and the kids said in unison.

"Got tired of the explosions, decided to pop back in and say hello." It wasn't really true, but it wasn't a _lie,_ either. Donna was good at those.

"Well… come in, won't you?" said Sarah Jane. "Would you like a muffin?"

"I hope not," a girl whose voice sounded a lot like Rani's called from the kitchen. "Clyde just ate the last one."

Sarah Jane had a look on her face that could only be the result of a year in a bunker with four teenagers. "There were _twelve of them!"_

Clyde looked up, crumbs on his lips. "Sorry."

There were footsteps behind Donna as the lovebirds finally came out of the TARDIS. "Are we actually there this time?" Tish asked drily. Lucy giggled. No… Donna thought about it. No, Lucy _laughed_ , even if it was just her way to laugh in that little trilling quiet way. She hadn't given that modest society-girl giggle in months now. Still hung on Tish's arm like a climbing pole, but it looked a lot more natural than when she'd done the same thing with Harold Saxon, affectionate rather than nervous or possessive. She kissed Tish's neck sweetly, and Tish tried to act like she didn't want to grin.

It'd taken them long enough. _Seriously_. With the amount of tension between them it really shouldn't have taken being captured and dangled alive over a cooking fire to get them to sort out their problems. Donna was glad they'd finally gotten through the heartfelt apologies and slow, painful "Thank you"s. Lucy's agonised, tearful acceptance of guilt for her willingness in helping the Master and confession that she felt like she would never deserve to be happy with anyone, and Tish's quiet forgiveness, had been sheer poetry.

But they had been dangling over _a bloody cooking fire_ , and Donna had cheerfully kicked them in the face and then there had been a great deal of shouting and swearing by everyone (but mostly Donna, because she was really quite good at it) and by the time they'd all stopped yelling at each other the weird snake-dog alien people were all unconscious and Theta was sitting quietly in the corner waiting for them to realise that ey'd rescued and untied them already.

So it was nice to be back among normal people who didn't have emotional confessions of love at the worst possible times. Unfortunately, there were still _some people_ who were seemingly incapable of having necessary conversations at the proper moment.

Theta stood there awkwardly, and Donna sighed, pushing em towards Sarah Jane gently. Ey took the hint and clasped onto her like something parasitic and absolutely adorable. Sarah Jane hesitated before putting her arms around em as well, and while Donna couldn't see eir face, ey only flinched a moment before relaxing into the embrace.

There was a flicker of uncertainty on Sarah Jane's face, replaced by sadness and then eventually a sort of unreadable peacefulness as she rested her chin on Theta's shoulder and closed her eyes.

Donna had seen photos of them together on the TARDIS, from what Theta described as "thousands of years and several lives ago"; this was like watching one of those photographs move. She was unbearably proud of Theta; in less than two months ey'd managed at least to feel mostly safe around humanoid women who _weren't_ one of the three of them. A tiny accomplishment in the grand scope of things, but amazing on the small-scale.

Finally, they pulled apart. Theta was wearing that expression ey had where ey wanted to cry but didn't have tear ducts; Sarah Jane didn't have that problem. But they were good tears, healing tears. Donna's granddad had always said there was no shame in crying because some things were worth crying over. Donna had a strange and overpowering urge to make both of them tea and take them stargazing.

Theta wiped the tears away from Sarah Jane's eyes with the back of eir hand and they stood there for more than a minute, staring into each other's eyes like they contained the secrets of the universe. Sarah Jane rubbed an absentminded thumb over eir knuckles.

"Come inside," she said quietly.

Theta smiled and shook eir head, and Donna knew she wasn't the only one who could see the pain in eir eyes. "Just stopping by."

"No you're not," said Sarah Jane resolutely. "Come inside."

"Sarah…"

"Come inside," she repeated. "Just for a few minutes."

Theta stared at the ground for a moment before nodding and letting her lead em through the door.

"Tish Jones, isn't it?" she asked as the others filed dutifully in after Theta. Tish nodded. "And… Lucy. You look much better."

Donna was fully prepared to launch a tirade if Sarah Jane started being snide towards Lucy. Donna was very, very good at tirades. They were in fact something of a specialty. So she was rather taken aback at the genuine friendliness in Sarah Jane's voice; it was all honesty and warmth, and if there was something in her eyes that didn't quite match her voice it was concern rather than doubt. Donna felt her respect for the woman go up by several degrees.

Lucy blushed prettily, perched on the couch with her ankles lightly crossed; there were some habits that would never die. Donna suspected she would find the prim-and-proper routine a lot more irritating if she hadn't seen Lucy take out a Sontaran reinforcement shuttle with a mining laser. It was almost a charming habit when they were all like this, sitting in Sarah Jane's sun-soaked living room with Luke and Santiago serving tea "to keep them out of trouble". Not that Donna would ever tell her that, of course.

"It's the exercise," she said modestly, sipping her tea.

"So what brings you back?" asked Sarah Jane. Her voice was light, but there was grief in her eyes as she looked at Theta; ey was trying very hard to remain engaged, visibly struggling with the effort of seeming fine, but instinct and conditioning had eir eyes downcast and voice silenced.

"We have to take care of the Master's remains," Tish said.

"He's dead?"

Theta worried eir lower lip between eir teeth, giving a tiny nod.

"Oh, Theta," Sarah Jane breathed, "I'm sorry."

Ey looked up at her. "So am I," ey said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WE'RE DONE WE'RE DONE WE'RE FUCKING DONE THANK FUCK.
> 
> Ahem. Thanks for reading, sorry for... everything, really. A sequel is sort of vaguely being planned, but will be a long time coming if it comes at all.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [On the Motions of Atoms](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6940573) by [guardingdark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/guardingdark/pseuds/guardingdark)




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